Yes, fair enough. R space for AirCanada is still available on EF. However, EF just confirmed that AC (and many other airlines) have been pulled from the "Awards and Upgrades" page. To your point, they are still available in the "Flight Availability" page.

End of an era. At one point, they were using ANA to get a lot of this availability -- wonder if they plugged whatever access point EF was using to get this data.

I like having GDS access, but without award support it's not worth the cost.

Looks like the end of EF being useful to me. Any chance they do pro rated refunds? I just paid for another year a month or two ago.

This is a real loss to me .
Sadly I have just paid my annual subscription - hopefully EF will be offering a partial refund !

Yes, absolutely. My annual subscription expired earlier this week and given today's development, I'm glad I didn't pay to re-up for another year. The loss of QR award inventory last year was a big negative, too.

ExpertFlyer Voice , do the changes announced in your recent email also affect seat alerts, plane change alerts, and schedule alerts?

Person behind this handle stepped away from FlyerTalk this past spring.

agreed, I set my account to not renew, this may be the end of EF

Agreed, also sometimes it is hours after space opens up that I get award notifications

Yes I did, however I'll try to answer some questions, but as a civilian not officially with EF anymore. The opinions expressed here are my own, etc etc etc.

As per the email that was sent to subs, this looks to affect just searching for award/upgrade class codes and alerts for those award class codes for the affected airlines.

Email [email protected] to ask them. I think EF still has it's uses, but any subscription decision you make should be based on its current state and not holding out hope for the return of lost data.

Correct, basically anything that wasn't an O/I/X award class would still be available in the Flight Availability search and therefore still alertable.

That’s not the use we make of EF over here (our programs aren’t covered), but YMMV.

Thanks for responding. Good luck in your civilian world.

This is a huge blow. Also kind of weak of EF to not send the email to everyone. I did not have an alert set up for any of the listed airlines today (But may be wanting to do that tomorrow..) and therefore I have not received the email as a paying subscriber. Though this does reflect the way EF has been handling customer interactions (i.e. generally quite bad customer service) so perhaps I should not be surprised.

An interesting one absent from the list is Aegean. It sounds like they are getting A3 I/X class inventory from elsewhere. Or was this just 'forgotten' to be included on the list of affected airlines...

I have a whole bunch of A3 alerts set up as I travel with them often. At the moment an inventory search still shows I/X class availability for A3 flights. Is that no longer the case for affected airlines (ie. all I/X inventory has been zeroed out), or is phantom availability being returned currently?

EF still has some uses but if you take out almost all of *A not to mention that many OW airlines are gone as well, then the value has decreased materially and the price has not. I am out.

ExpertFlyer needs to he more transparent and explain in detail how it used to have access of award availability for Star Alliance airlines (web scraping ? API access ?) and how it lost it

Didn't fully cancel account but did cancel auto-renewal (which is due in about a month).

Why?

1) Flying less
2) I've noticed I haven't used it more than once or twice in the last year
3) More flexible now and am using other tools for flight alerts (award and cheap J tix)