Hi arlflyer, welcome to ExpertFlyer. First, the seat map is not an indicator of ticket availability because you can have sold tickets without seat assignments, so put that aside.

The availability values are "at least" that number. So US may only be publishing a maximum of 6 but AA publishes a maximum of 7 for their fare classes. Also since AA is the codeshare partner here, they may not have the most accurate inventory count, so go with the operating airlines published numbers.

That being said, if you have AA elite status then being upgrading on a US operated flight is more complicated then just how many seats are available, since priority may be given to US members first. However F seems seem fairly open assuming we're talking about a domestic flight with a smaller coach cabin.

Thanks for the quick response!

I understand it in the direction you describe (tickets sold but seats not assigned), but what would account for what I am seeing in the other direction - seats assigned that haven't been sold yet? I don't know the inventory management system on an algorithmic/programming level but doesn't that indicate that somewhere something is saying those seats have been sold or given away or otherwise occupied?

This makes sense. I've had a whole mess of AA/US issues with this itinerary, outside the scope of this discussion, but they integration has not been seamless on this one it will suffice to say!

Agreed, but my understanding is that I'd have a shot at least starting at T-24, and it is also my understanding that US is pretty good about upgrading its own elites at the open of the windows. I've seen F inventory drop after the 7, 4, and 3 day windows opened. I suppose there could be a bunch of Silvers at the 2-day window, but barring that, I'd think I have a chance, no?

Appreciate it!

I would appreciate an update on EF efforts to:

1. Restore searching award availability for UA and other missing Star carriers.

2. Add availability for US, including itineraries that include AA and other One World partner metal.

Thanks very much.

We are actively working on both and making progress, however we would not be able to announce anything specific until such a feature is ready to be made public and available. Thank you for your patience.

You've been "actively exploring and making progress" for almost a year now, it's why I let my subscription expire. If you've got nothing, at least be honest and say so.

That is not the case, but we can't share anything at this time.

Does EF distinguish between low and mid level bus/first awards?
 

Hi, I have been frustrated by the difference between Delta & EF award fare codes.

If I find an R code inventory in an EF search, and then ask Delta DM folk, they say they don't have any R. They have RD (mid) and RK (high) but not R (low).

EF lists only R. Do they lump R and RD together?

Thanks.

As was already replied to in the other thread in which you posted this question:

Is EF still doing any sort of ongoing product development? As a very regular user and AA flyer, I find there are lots of little annoyances that I'd love to have addressed to make the product a lot more usable:

1) Main site: for AA award searches, when booking I often like to see loads as well as check upgrade award availability. It's a pain to have to run a query for loads, then an entirely separate one to check award status. It'd be much easier if the award check also ran a parallel check to show loads in the same page, so I could see 'C0' and also the underlying 'J7I7R7...' data. Alternately, offer a prepopulated link to get this data with a single click rather than going through a brand new query form.

2) Mobile: the mobile site is nicely efficient, but comes at the downside of reduced functionality. Often if manually searching for award space on AA, the lack of granular hourly choices (and lack of filter for codeshares) means I can't pull up a particular flight. For example, often I'll try searching for upgrade availability on a popular route like JFK-LHR and not be able to pull up the exact flight I want (i.e., the top 5 or so results are either earlier AA flights plus BA codeshares). At a minimum, the award search should filter out codeshares since those aren't applicable for upgrades anyways. And codeshares should be filtered out on award searches.

3) General: persistent search fields! If I'm searching regularly, I'd love to see some sort of ability to save common settings. Even inside the same session, it'd be nice to prepopulate the forms with last-used data, not to mention across multiple sessions. I use the "Refine" link extensively but sometimes if I go down a seat query, I have to start from scratch to go back.

4) Dates: the system is US-centric, so the date picker is set to default to yesterday when I'm searching from the UK in the morning. Surely it's easy to poll for location or time zone of browser to adjust. Or just let me set default time as a system setting.

Anyone else have these sorts of use concerns?

Have you seen the link at the top that says "Search for Awards & Upgrades for XXX to YYY on ZZ"? It's shown on the results page for a flight availability search; clicking it goes to a search page with all the information from the flight search prepopulated, and you just have to put in the specific award/upgrade codes you're looking for.

I think that describes what you're looking for.

ETA: regarding point 3, you can specify some defaults in the "My Account" page.

Yep, I have all the defaults maxed out.

You're right about the link on the regular flight availability page. But there's not a reciprocal link on the awards page however.

Yes we do, as we posted on Thursday we just released new features:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/23171474-post917.html

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions. As we note below you do have some of this functionality today however we will consider your feedback for future enhancements.

You can do this today by adding up to 3 regular fare classes as the "Other" classes in the Award search.

The Exclude Codeshare option is more complicated to add to the mobile site vs the full website. You can still use the time of day filter to make sure your flight shows. If you need further help with a specific example please email us.

As noted by cmn.jcs you can set preferences for departing airport and airlines(s), as well as date/time formats on the My Account page. You shouldn't have to start from scratch to go back, you can open a refined search in a new browser tab by right clicking on the Refine Query link and selecting to open in a new tab.
Our servers change to the next day at 6AM London time. You can adjust the date and time formats to European format from the My Account page.

Thanks for the response. It's definitely the little things.

For example, regardless of desktop or mobile, for all my searches I select "exclude codeshares." In fact I'm not sure any award searches (or upgrades at least) where you'd want to include codeshares. On what airlines is a codeshare upgradable?

For time zone, it's not the format I care about, it's when the actual day ticks over. In the UI, you could use the browser timezone to do this better vs using a single server-side date determination.

For the problems w/ mobile, pick a high frequency route like LHR-JFK. Search for a particular flight late in a particular period like 3pm. BA codeshares often come up and if only a few are returned, I can't see the particular AA flight I wanted to see. This happens intermittently as the # of results returned varies due to reasons I cannot understand.

Example:
On mobile site, pick "Morning" JFK-LHR on just AA.
Flight 104 is the seventh result. And often it doesn't show award inventory on that high a result #, but only shows the first few results. Of the 6 above, all but two are useless BA codeshares. Choosing "early morning" moves 104 to ninth place with more BA garbage.

I just ran a query for early AM today on the 14th. This was the result from mobile, which is also useless as it's not even returning flights for this morning (I'm running this at 8am London time for JFK morning flights):

AA 100 JFK 6:10p → LHR 6:20a
C1
Expanded
AA (BA) 6133 JFK 6:40p → LHR 6:35a
C7
Expanded
AA (BA) 6139 JFK 7:00p → LHR 6:55a
C7
Expanded
AA (BA) 6141 JFK 7:30p → LHR 7:30a
C7
Expanded
AA 106 JFK 7:30p → LHR 7:45a
C7
Expanded
AA (BA) 6137 JFK 8:40p → LHR 8:35a
C7
Expanded
AA 104 JFK 8:45p → LHR 9:00a
C7
Expanded
AA (BA) 6212 JFK 9:30p → LHR 9:25a
C7
Expanded
AA (BA) 6135 JFK 9:50p → LHR 9:55a
C7
Expanded
AA (BA) 6145 JFK 10:55p → LHR 11:00a
C7

The BA flights should not even be here and the date is screwed up on mobile it seems.

The amount of AA flights returned by AA varies based on how many of them actually have >0 inventory. If none do, AA returns 2 flights then stops, otherwise it will show the flights where inventory >0.

Your comment of "the date is screwed up" is not clear the results you post don't show dates. The mobile results will match the website results if you don't select Exclude Codeshares. If after comparing the two you find an issue, please email the example to [email protected] so our support team can see it, thanks.

We have just added an Exclude Codeshares option to our mobile search.