Is there any visibility as to when the BA Award Availability search (and therefore alerts, I assume) issue will be addressed?

rb211.

We're making progress on that issue but we don't have an ETA at this time, thank you.

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TWA884
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Still receiving the error:
BA award inventory is temporarily unavailable due to an issue with our data provider. They are actively working to fix the issue. Thank you for your patience.
This gives a new meaning to "temporarily" and "actively" - this has been an ongoing problem for weeks.

I received an email that my ExpertFlyer account had lapsed due to nonpayment and found that I'd yet to update my payment information from an address change on that account.

Problem was solved within minutes with the online billing department / account information section.

Just a friendly reminder for everyone to check the billing information on your account when you're up for renewal. ExpertFlyer checks your account for an updated and correct address.

First time I see the following error on ExpertFlyer:
Searched on FlyerTalk but posts about that error message seem mixed and depending on the airline. I'm looking at AMS-PTY KL757 12/12/2020.

It means that the airline isn't allowing seat assignments (either in general or by agents) for that cabin/flight and therefore won't return a seat map.

 J9 C9 D0 I0 Z0 O0 Y9 B9 M0 P0 U0 F0 K0 W0 H0 S0 L0 A0 Q0 T0 E0 N0 R0 V0 X0 G0

I am new to ExpertFlyer. What does the above mean please? 18 seats available in Business and 18 in Economy?

I am basically trying to find out how full it is, it's a Boeing 737.

The numbers are how many seats the airline is willing to sell currently in that fare bucket, so if you want to know the total number of seats available you should look only at the highest bucket in each cabin. i.e. if a flight shows J6 C4 there are 6 total seats in biz that the airline is willing to sell at full J but they are only willing to make 4 of them available for a C fare. Similarly for Y and the lower economy buckets.

However, inventory is only shown up to 9, so if you see 9, that means "9 or more". So in this case there are at least 9 seats in biz and at least 9 in economy. Although again, this is how many the airline is willing to sell and may include overbooking so the true number of seats could be lower.

Each letter represents a fare bucket, and within a class or travel, the numbers are not cumulative. In your example, the airline is prepared to sell nine or more tickets in the J bucket and 9 or more tickets in the C bucket (both for business class of course.) It does NOT necessarily mean (and probably doesn't mean) that the airline is willing to sell at least 18 business class tickets. In fact it may only be willing to sell a maximum of 9 business class tickets in total. There may not even be 9 seats available due to overselling. Same applies to economy. Hope that helps.

rb211.

And you can't ever really know how full the flight is from looking at availability displays.

For example, if an airline is thinking of cancelling a flight, it might restrict bookings in the way that you see on that flight even though it may only have taken a handful of reservations for that flight. This could be because the airline will happily sell a full or nearly-full fare ticket, and use the money to offset some of the costs of reaccommodating the passenger if the flight is later cancelled; but the airline may be unwilling to run this risk for tickets at lower fares. So it shows up as the airline only being prepared to take J class or C class reservations in business class, and only Y class and B class reservations in economy, with zeroes in every other booking class, even though there are actually very few (even perhaps no) bookings on that flight.

Conversely, I have been on flights where a day or two before travel, every booking class has had a 9 - and yet the flight went out 100% full. This can, in part, be because the airline can fill any space not sold at commercial fares with staff travel and other sub-load passengers.

One final thing to mention: the numbers are not linear. With J9 C9 showing, you could book one C class seat and find that availability immediately drops to (say) J6 C4.

So the only thing that you can ever really take away with confidence from an availability display is the number of reservations that the airline is, at that precise time, prepared to take in that booking class in one booking. Everything else is uncertain.

The first few pages of the Expertflyer EduGuide will help you understand what this display can mean. See:
https://www.expertflyer.com/edu-guide.pdf

I have used ExpertFlyer to find United saver business class(IN) availability and until now have been pleased with their product. I set several alerts to notify me of IN availability in September from EWR to JNB. I just happened to look on my own and found 2 seats available on a couple of the dates I set alerts for. I made the reservation I wanted and the next day I looked at availability and United was still showing availability for both of the dates I found before (including the date I made the reservation for).
I made 2 inquires to ExpertFlyer asking why the alert had not triggered but have received no response. I am quite disappointed in ExpertFlyer, especially in their non-responsiveness to my inquiry, and I won't be able to depend on them in the future.

Not only is it not possible to create an alert for a 2 letter class code (the "class" field accepts 1 character only), but "IN" is not a supported award class for UA and is not listed in the Award & Upgrade search for United. We also just checked our DB and there is no active IN alert for any user, so it's not clear what you created an alert for, but it doesn't seem to be for IN class.

We also have not seen any customer service email about this, so maybe you are confusing us with another service? Of course since we don't know who you are we can't lookup your account or email history, so if you PM me your email I can check but something seems off.

I'm not impressed with that "EduGuide" (granted it is from 2011). It shows an example with the comment:
This is about as confusing and misleading as it could possibly be -- suggesting even for a moment the nonsensical calculation J7 + D7 + I6 = 20. It should clearly state that the process is "not cumulative" as noted by RB211 above -- i.e., the numbers represent availability of the same seats in different fare buckets and there is no reason to add them.
It does go on to say:
But this could be stated much more straightforwardly -- e.g., "under almost all circumstances, the seats for sale in a lower fare bucket are a subset of those for sale in a higher fare bucket in the same cabin".