Hi kcaluwae, thanks for signing up for ExpertFlyer! To our knowledge R is not full fare economy. Looking at the class availability of a sample AY flight:

J4 C4 D4 I4 Y4 B4 H4 K4 M4 P4 T4 L4 V4 S4 Q4 Z4 R4 G4 W4 X4 E0

You'll see that R is pretty far down the list after Y, so it's not a full fare coach fare.

Yes. Flight Alerts work for any supported award/upgrade class ExpertFlyer shows: http://www.expertflyer.com/sessionlessClassList.do as well as any regular fare class code.

Phenomal product
 

I just wanted to say that EF is a phenomenal product. I was very reluctant to join, but finally did it. It's worth every penny. The amount of time saved is just massive. If you think of the hours of work that one saves with EF, $10/month is nothing, especially if you think of how much more money one makes than $10/hour (most FTers I assume). The only problem now is that UA doesn't release the R inventory very much, so my alerts don't have anything to alert me to!

There are two components that go into how much you'll pay for an airline ticket: fares and availability. You need both.

Airlines publish a lot of fares, all of which have certain requirements. Cheaper fares tend to have more requirements and restrictions than more expensive fares, including advance purchase requirements, Saturday night stay requirements, day of travel restrictions, that sort of thing. So just because you see a low fare published doesn't necessarily mean you qualify for it based on your travel plans.

Each fare has specific classes it will let you book into. Usually, this is determined by the first letter of the fare basis code. For example, TA14A0NA usually books you into T class. (There are exceptions where it gets a bit more complicated, but I won't muddy the waters with them just yet.)

Once you have determined which fares you are eligible for, you must search the flight's inventory to see if there is availability in that fare class. Airlines have a hierarchy. For example, Delta's fare class hierarchy is F P A for First Class and Y B M H Q K L U T E for Economy, in decreasing order. You'll see inventory displays like:

In order for you to book a ticket, there must be (1) a fare you qualify for and (2) availability in the relevant fare class. So in this example, even if your itinerary qualified for the TA14A0NA fare, there is no T inventory. Delta is only willing to sell seats on this plane at a higher fare: Q and up.

Sometimes the opposite happens. There might be lots of inventory even in the lowly T and E fare classes like this:

but with no T or E fares published. You wouldn't be able to book a ticket in T or E class, because you need both a fare that you qualify for as well as inventory to book into.

When you find a fare for which you meet the requirements, and you also find inventory in that fare class on your desired flight, then the price of that particular fare is what you will pay. It's important to note that the published fares are excusive of taxes and fees, so you will always end up with a higher all-in price than you see in a fare search on EF.

Need some help please:

I've used EF to find the following flight availability on AA:

However, when I go to the AA (or even BA) sites, I don't see that flight available in either Z, U, or T. Why would the flight not show up on the carrier's website if EF shows it as available?

thanks

Not sure when you did your searches as availability is dynamic but neither EF nor AA show any U availability on the date you indicate now.

A search for that flight show's 0's across the board:

Results from ExpertFlyer.com

I hope this is the right thread.
If I do a search for ord to msy on 2-9-13 I get some good fairs ($278 rt) with an effect date of 1/22/13 Expiration date of 3/19/13

does that mean a sale/low fair promo is going to start on the 22nd? currently ita/other sites have prices in the $450 rt range

I found that information here: https://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/e...es/finnair.jsp

So it will give you 1,5 EQP. That seems like a good deal.:)

Please keep in mind that the Fare Information results exclude taxes and fees. Also there needs to be availability in that fare class on a given flight. javabytes gave a good explanation of this in post #98 above.

It could be a misprint. The published fare and availability information indicates that it is not the case.

Flight number validation
 

It could me that the flight number validation for numbers only shall be removed. Ie some AF flights from SIN to PAR are currently rescheduled under a new flight number AF257A. And 'A' is not accepted by EF, so unable to see seatmap as a result (actually it shows the seatmap for another flight, the genuine AF257).

Flight numbers only have numbers in them, not letters. The GDSs are built upon that assumption. When you try to add a letter into the flight number, it breaks the request:

As you can see, the error message returned when including a letter in the flight number is much different then just simply putting in a non-operational flight number.

Same with Seat Maps:

As you can see if you try to put a letter in the flight number, it just doesn't work.

So reading through this thread, I shouldn't solely rely on EF's flight alerts to find my MileSaaver flights as it only checks a few times a day. Is there a way to find out when it checks, so I can check the 'other' times. Also, if I execute a saved query, are the results real time with the airlines or is it pulling on the data last checked by EF? If it is real time results, this will be a good tool for me to check for those 'other' times not checked by EF.

Also, is there a way of finding out how many award seats have been released in the past through EF or any other tool?

Thanks for any insight in advance.

You are welcome to check manually whenever you want, however Flight Alerts have been working successfully to find award availability for ExpertFlyer users since 2006. The idea is that the alerts check around the clock so you can go on living your life with one less thing to worry about.
There are no "set" times that alerts check. Not only does each alert have its own schedule but that schedule gets more frequent as the date of the flight gets closer.
All results are retrieved in real time from the reservation systems when you request them.
No.