From their own website "Red Ventures is an American media company that owns and operates brands such as Lonely Planet, The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate. Red Ventures focuses on news, advice, and review websites."

They are not a software company, and most likely care about nothing but revenue. There is a much higher ROI, when they have zero "I," but keep getting revenue.

Apparently, they just don't care.

If somebody recently paid for a full year with viewing seats as their primary goal, I wonder if they could get a credit card chargeback..... :-/

I wonder what the investment thesis was for it. Give TPG and friends first dibs on award notifications? I have to imagine they changed some strategy soon after they bought it and then decided to transition it to minimal-maintenance mode to slowly let it die while collecting whatever revenue they could. I hope the EF founders made off with good $ at least for it.

Seat maps are down for me too. I wonder if anyone still actually works at EF or if they quietly gutted the staff. Features have gone away or have stopped working over the last few years without fixes.

Back when Red Ventures bought EF, they made a HUGE deal about it. Here’s the TPG article that is buried within Google, and I’m taking out the quote that I remember:

“Additionally, ExpertFlyer intends on adding new features to its service, powered by Red Ventures' deep experience in data science and analytics. It also plans on a redesign that will make using the search engine easier, and make ExpertFlyer an even better tool for travelers than it already is.”

If only this happened and wasn’t the furthest thing from the truth.

Not defending Red Ventures, but I think the timing of the acquisition also coincided with a general shift in the industry on frequent flyer programs.

Let's rewind to the years before 2018. In the US, which feels like an outsized contributor in the FF world, the elite dollar spend requirements were just starting to take hold. We weren't really overrun with all the bloggers yet. Blogging was more trip reporting. The miles "hackers" were not really credit card churners but mileage runners or the brilliant, patient dollar coin exploiters. I guess this was more pre-2010s and the 2010s was the transition decade. Airlines still engaged with their frequent flyer community and turned a blind eye to any tools championed by it. Pre-2018, how many brands still maintained reps on FT? A lot more than today, which feels like zero. I didn't have eyes on all FT boards but I know we had UA insider, Starwood lurker, etc.

Now, what has happened since 2018. Airline miles are part of an influencer/blogger/credit card machine and not tied to BIS miles, with a few holdouts. There are multiple services now seemingly scraping information for awards on a large scale. I'm not lumping EF as a scraper but airlines generally started to look unkindly at consumer tools that are not airline.com and wanted them shut down. I'm sure this added more complication to EF. Airline support has gotten chipped away over the years, as feeds have probably been pulled. The problem is EF still advertises a service they no longer deliver, or deliver very inconsistently/poorly.

Not to be too nostalgic, but I feel like the slow death of EF, which has really accelerated in 2024, is the final chapter of frequent flying of yesteryear.

Interestingly, seat maps are working for Alaska Airlines, but not for American, LATAM, and others. Strange.

Seat maps not working for Swiss (LX) nor Lufthansa (LH).

Contacted support and also flipped my account to "no renewal" until this is fixed.

Seat maps and plane change notifications not working for : United-UA, Japan Airlines-JL, Hawaiian Airlines-HA

Displaying seat maps on BA or AA has not worked for a couple of days. Is there an expertflyer problem?

Same for AY. And CX https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/cath...l#post36617435
Not urgent for me, I'm happy to let EF resolve its data issues.
But hope they resolve before it does become urgent.

Seat maps broken for multiple airlines.. in fact seems to be most for several days now.

Same as above for EK for at least a couple of days now.

Add NZ and DL to the no seat map list if it already has not been mentioned.

SQ seatmaps are broken as well.

Having auto-renewed for many years (even through Covid), I flipped the renewal 'off' yesterday. EF have until the end of the month - at least my renewal was timed right :)