About to bite the bulled for the premium service. Are there any links for either a discount for me or a referral bonus for someone else so we can share the FT love?

How to use the award availability tool?
 

I'm trying to learn how to use the award availability tool. As an exercise I want to find out if it's possible to fly from NYC to LON with a stopover in HKG. This seems like it would be possible from what I understand of United's award routing rules. But EF only allows searching one way award availability. Additionally I want to find out if I can do NYC-LON(Stop)-HKG-SFO. There doesn't seem to be a tool designed for answering these types of queries

The Award & Upgrade search tool will allow you to search for award availability on each segment you want to fly (NYC-HKG then HKG-LON). For the rules of if/how stopovers are allowed for your proposed award routing you should either contact your airline or look at the posts in the proper airline forum here on FT.

If EF had a way to search for flights scheduled to arrive at a particular gate, that could be used to find the backing flight. (You'd do a flight status query on your departing flight, see its gate assignment, then do a query to find the flights scheduled to land at that gate.)

If you're flying AA, AA.com's flight status and gates and times forms have a button to show the incoming flight information. Very handy to know if your flight will board early or late.

There is currently no way to do such a search to our knowledge.

Mine neither. Consider it a new feature request?

I regularly use Expertflyer (sometimes a few dozen times a day) and am quite happy with the product, however I do find it slightly annoying to be kicked out / having to log in again after 30min (?) of inactivity.

Could you please extend the validity of a session (either as a general change or at least as a "stay logged in when using this computer" feature)?

Thanks for considering!

Thank you for your feedback. The current timeout is 45 minutes, and the way the website currently works an active session uses resources on our servers, so we have to strike a balance. How this works is something we are looking to change in the future, however it is not a simple or quick change.

Have you had any reports of phantom availability with Turkish?

For example, take a look at JRO-IST on 8/23/13. I2, X7. But the ANA tool does not show the space and while United and Aeroplan do show it, both error out when trying to book the seat.

Any ideas?

We have had no issue with TK award availability. We just checked against 3 different GDSs and 2 points of sale and all show the same numbers for the TK 673. The issue may be in how TK published the schedule as the flight is IST-JRO-MBA-IST and if you try to bring up the Flight Details for that flight on that day you'll see no information is returned (there is an underlying error returned by the GDS). This could be causing the problem where AC and UA cannot book the flight.

If there are any other flights you have a question about please email the information to [email protected]

Sorry for this very newbie question...

I was looking at fare information on EF and the system gives a list of fares. The price on these fares is often lower than what I get when I go directly on the operating carrier's website. Does this mean that the fares EF displays are bookable? If so, how do I book them, since the operating carrier's website does not show these fares. Would I have to call the airline directly?

Thanks!

No, the Fare Information search just lists published fares. You need to look at the availability of the fare class on a specific flight to see if the fare can be applied to that flight. As per our FAQ:

Also our EduGuide would be helpful in understanding the relationship between the published fare tariffs and the availability of those fare classes.

Ok. I'll be sure to give those a look, and ask if I have any further questions.

Thanks for the prompt response!

How to book a cheaper fare bucket
 

Hi Expertflyer,

I just signed up for the 5-day free trial to see if I can get some advantage for my travel from your tool.

I have an upcoming trip to KUL for which I'm looking for tickets. Cheapest tickets I found are 804€ (428€ fare + taxes). fare bucket: Q
This is with AY.

So I had a look in expertflyer and I found some cheaper fare buckets: O,Z,R.
Fare starting at 336€ (if I remember well)
However one of this fare buckets is R and R is supposed to be full-fare economy with AY and the rate is cheaper. I'm a bit puzzled...

LH F Award Travel Alerts
 

I've looked through the thread and couldn't find the answer to my question. Does EF allow an alert to be set up that shows when an F award seat (O fare bucket) opens up on a specific LH flight?
Thank you