We get our data directly from the airline reservation systems (GDS) and airlines don't always publish the same information via the GDSs that are on their websites. Conversely, sometimes data is available via the GDSs that aren't available at all on airline websites, like AA and DL upgrade inventory.

Also, accessing data via the GDS allows us to show actual award class inventories instead of a yes/no answer for a number specified in the search. It also allows us to provide services that we wouldn't otherwise be able to like Flight and Seat Alerts.

Any way to lookup award availability on AA partner airlines - BA or IB? When I select J it shows me J7 for a BA codeshare flight but the AA phone agents dont see this as bookable.

Example BA 6445 LHR-JNB 12/18/2010 - shows J7.

That is because an Award/Upgrade search is for that airline only, not partner airlines or code shares. That's why it states at the top of the results page:

**NOTE** The Award & Upgrade information is only valid for flights flown on the searched airline (not code shares) and only when using miles/points/certificates from the searched airline, not partner airlines.

That aside, AAnytime awards (which is what J is) are not usually valid on partner airlines AFAIK, just SAAver awards. To find out regular award inventory on AA partner airlines, search BA.com or Qantas.com.au using their partner award search tools, or call AA directly.

ExpertFlyer Improvements and Enhancements
 

Over the last few weeks we've been rolling out some new enhancements and improvements to ExpertFlyer. Tonight we sent out an email to our membership with the details:

Major improvements to the American Airlines Award & Upgrade search:

• Now there is no need to do multiple searches with different times of day to see all the flights that have Award or Upgrade availability. Later flights, with availability, will now display, even if earlier flights do not have availability. If no later flights show, then there is no availability for that date.
• A maximum of 12 segments are returned instead of the previous 6.
• When there are more then 12 non-stop or direct flights available, a Get More Results link will appear at the bottom of the flight results allowing you to see the additional flights with 1 click .
• You can now specify connecting airports for an Award & Upgrade search on AA.

We have also added Award and/or Upgrade searching for these new airlines:

• Aerolineas Argentinas (AR)
• Frontier Airlines (F9)
• LOT - Polish Airlines (LO)
• Martinair (MP)
• Tarom (RO)
• Transaero Airlines (UN)
• Turkish Airlines (TK)
• VLM Airlines (VG)
• Air Canada (AC) - Not only have we added Coach Award availability, but both Coach and Business Award availability are now searchable a full 355 days in advance via the Award & Upgrade search tool. (As such, also with with Flight Alerts 355 days out.)

Other recent improvements:

• Flight Status Comments have been improved and now show all the flight comments when applicable for AA flights.
• Qantas Australia domestic flight seat maps are now available for users who have elite frequent flyer status either on Qantas or any of its partner airlines (such as Oneworld). Enter your Frequent Flyer number on the Preferences tab of the My Account page to take advantage of this.
• El Al (LY) Seat Maps are now available
• British Airways Flight Availability information is now available a full 355 days in advance. Just specify BA as the only airline in the search.
• A new “Show Flights with No Availability” toggle filter is now available under "Filter Search Results" on the Flight Availability and Award & Upgrade result pages. This will allow you to hide flights with no availability in the search results.
• We have also increased the maximum allowed number of Flight & Seat Alerts from 20 to 30 for our Premium subscribers.

We hope you find these ongoing improvements helpful in your travels, and we're planning even more improved and new features between now and the end of the year. Thanks for your support.

-EFV

BA seat maps don't seem to work anymore.

We tested several and they are working fine. Must have been a momentary issue with BA. The best way to report a suspected outage in the future is by emailing us at [email protected]

Don't forget that BA seatmaps always are pulled by BA around 24 hours before the flight. Before that they're working fine for me.

Hello-

I'm using the trial and loving it, but a couple of quick questions:

1) How often are the fare alerts running? Previously I've been using KVS every day to validate no seats (award travel) have become available on my preferred flight. Now I've setup an alert (UA), for a trip in early January. Is the expert flyer frequency greater or less than my current once-a-day tactic?

2) I've noticed a lot of weirdness with LX award availability where I try and look up flights, and it acts as if there's not a flight there at all (I can then validate it in KVS). Is this common? (Case to repro: ZRH-JNB on DEC27 in C)

3) Any hope for Continental awards?

Thanks!

Great! Glad to hear. The checks are anywhere from several times a day to several times an hour, depending on how close the departure date/time is. So yes, it's much better then manual one-a-day checking.
If there is no award availability on any flight for a specific class that day, LX won't return any flights in the GDS, not even with zeros, just the message "NO SERVICE BETWEEN RQSTD CITIES" which we show as our standard No Availability message.

Are you comparing to ANA availability or M&M? Are you saying that you see the flight and it's showing zero, or that you see the flight and it's showing available awards for the flight? You can add an "other" class code like Y to the search to see the schedule.

FYI, the LX award availability on ExpertFlyer is from the LX/M&M point of view, not from the ANA/Star Alliance partner point of view. They can be different.

That's up to Continental.

Dear EF,

SU is changing the rules applicable to its fares effective 18 Oct.

I would appreciate if you could check if stopovers are permitted for the lowest RT fare (LPX) for a sample route LON-LED [Zone 2 - Zone 2 is the case in point] => to do that ticketing date on/after 18 OCT should be specified (it looks like the new rule is already active/ available).

Thanks a lot!

Please email the request to [email protected] and we'll see if we can look it up, thanks.

Does anyone have problems viewing seat maps for QF via EF? Haven't been able to load QF seat maps for the past week.

New feature request
 

Having been an EF user for quite a while now, I am pretty happy with it...however, one thing I would really like to see is a "stay logged on" option. I appreciate that this not desirable when using EF from a shared or public computer, but I almost always use it from my own laptop, and having to log on repeatedly becomes a PITA. By all means, make this reasonably difficult to set so people do not turn it on accidentally, but it would be a real boon for a lot of us I'm sure.

This feature request isn't really new. It was requested and discussed a year ago in this very thread. The conclusion is that basically:

EF is going to stay this way for a host of questionable reasons
KVSTool is an alternative software tool that avoids this issue entirely

Understood. There are a few reasons why we do it this way, some may not agree with them, but at the end of the day if something happens because of it, we're the ones liable. That being said, maybe there is a middle ground we can come up with. FYI, even if we did have an auto-login, there still would be a 45 min session timeout as we can't hold sessions (and the resource usage that comes with it) open indefinitely. In the meantime, we're focusing our limited development resources on adding new features.


QF seat maps are working correctly, if you are still having an issue please email [email protected] with the exact seat map search you are having an issue with.