I'm having trouble with UA transcon searches on EF too. All days & classes are returning 0. UA site itself is working fine.

The UA site itself is having issues: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...ug-2013-a.html

UA Award inventory can still be searched by selecting "Star Alliance" as the airline in the Award search. UA regular fare class availability remains unaffected via the Flight Availability search tool.

You are correct. When I checked UA's site to see if it was working I only checked for awards and not upgrades.

Hello ExpertFlyer!

I've read through the FAQs on EF's website, and searched within this thread, but I came up empty handed:

What should subscribers do when an airline (AA, in this case) renumbers a large portion of their flights as it relates to flight alerts? Should the subscriber re-run the search and set a new alert with the updated flight number?

I'm fortunate that I only have a few active flight alerts, so I set alerts with the updated flight numbers. However, is their a systematic way to take care of this on your end?

Presumably, AA renumbered several flights to open up flight numbers for US-AA integration (if that even comes to fruition).

If an airline changed the flight number of a flight then yes you would have to create a new alert.

BA premium economy
 

What is the reason BA premium economy fares are shown as economy?

From what i see the issue is industry fare type not set to 'premium' in many cases, but this could be Sabre specific. Is it?

Because BA sometimes doesn't file the cabin properly in the Booking Class listings, but sometimes it does:

Results from ExpertFlyer.comIf you do a Booking Class look-up you'll see that some fares are described as being PE and some are not. It all depends on if BA is consistent on how they file the fares and all of the descriptors surrounding the fares.

IME, BA is very consistent as to how the fares are described. E and T class are always described as "economy", and the "premium economy" designator is reserved for (some) W class fares.

I'm sure that there is a commercial reason behind it. I can guess at some possibilities, but that would be pure speculation on my part. However, the one thing that this is not is "inconsistent". It's far too consistent to be either that, or anything other than thought-through and totally deliberate.

Inconsistent in that all PE fares (T, E, and W) are not clearly designated as such in the same way, whether on purpose or not.

Sure - just as long as nobody thinks that BA does this at random.

The cabin type (or more accurately 'industry fare type') determines booking classes on secondary airlines unless those booking classes are specified for lesser fare families (ie T-fares).

That's the only thing I would think of but i would not really think of this to be the real reason.

LH employing selective *A award space inventory blocking on a per flight basis?
 

Hello Expert Flyer Voice,

I know LH releases remaining award avail to *A (different bucket than M&M) member 5 days from travel date.

Using expertflyer's awesome service (worth every penny!) I would see great and consistent avail, nearly every day in early August, for LH #457 LAX-FRA in business class. Same with the other daily flight LH #451.

This was showing good avail for a few weeks straight, daily if searching 1-5 days out.

However, these last couple weeks now the flight isn't even showing up - period. Shouldn't it appear but simply displaying zero avail in selected classes?

I see some LH flights from other cities (DEN and ORD) that have zero avail, but at least they are appearing.

But I am not even seeing either LAX-FRA daily flights show up.

I can see seats to sell avail on the seat mapper, enough seats that some should even appear in award buckets.

My point is: Curious if LH has blocked *A from seeing a particular flights?

Thank You!

For the Star Alliance award search airlines a flight may not be shown if there is no award availability in any cabin for the flight. You can still create a Flight Alert for the flight from the results page of the Flight Availability search or via the Create New Flight Alert page.

Is EF down for everyone, or just me? I get only the following text when visiting http://www.expertflyer.com:

[ETA]Ok it's back... but that was weird... and I definitely didn't misspell expertflyer.com...[/ETA]

ExpertFlyer.com doesn't use PHP, so it looks like a stale DNS record. If it happens again, restart your browser and email us, thanks.

Edit: We found there is a known bug with Firefox where it ignores DNS timeout information, sometimes resulting in stale DNS information. The work around is to do a Ctrl-Shift-Reload of the page or restart Firefox.