Is there a way to make an alert that will tell me if the lowest bookable fare changes?

IE... and alert for if the lowest bookable fare goes from Q to M (on DL)?

I would assuming that M will have inventory even if Q is being sold so an alert to say if M goes from 0 to 1+ will not work.

Thanks?

If you really care about fare and not booking class, the tool you want is Yapta.

No, I don't care about the fare, hence why I don't do a cost tracking web site. I'm trying to wait to book a fare when the lowest booking class becomes M or higher.

You might try setting an alert for when H is less than 1. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that M will still have any inventory.

It sounds like what you really care about is when there is no longer Q availability. How about an alert for Q is less than 1?

Flight Alerts now has the ability to alert both when availability in a fare class is going up, and going down. It sounds like you want to set several alerts for all of the fare classes below M to be notified if any of them go to 0.

However, don't assume that one class will have availability when another doesn't, revenue management can zero out several classes at once if they want to, without warning.

Just want to confirm I can create an availability alert for an awards flight in a particular class... ie I want to get a text/email if two award seats open up in first on a particular route on a particular day for a particular airline. (even if the route has stops)

Yes you can. There's a free trial after all.

Hi coregis, yes you can, however be aware that Flight Alerts are for a specific flight, not any flight on a route. You would have to create multiple Flight Alerts if you want to monitor the inventory of multiple flights. The list of airlines that we support award or upgrade searching and alerting for is here: http://www.expertflyer.com/sessionlessClassList.do

We have a 5-day trial of our Premium service for you to try ExpertFlyer. Please email us at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Purchasing of Extra Flight Alerts
 

Today we have released an often asked for feature - the ability to purchase extra Flight Alerts beyond the 30 active alerts included with our Premium service.

As with Seat Alerts, additional Flight Alerts will cost $.99 each and are purchased at the time the Flight Alert is created. The extra Flight Alerts can also be purchased using the enhanced mobile version of ExpertFlyer (iOS,Andriod,etc.)

As always, if you have any questions please email us at [email protected]

What fare class should I search for to find award availability on Delta using EF? I tried N, R, O but nothing ever shows up even if Delta website shows low level awards. It seems EF does not provide DL award availability at all. When will that support be added? Thanks.

Hi ikonos, as noted in the first post of this thread, the list of airlines/classes currently supported for Award & Upgrade searching is here: http://www.expertflyer.com/sessionlessClassList.do You'll note that we support DL upgrade inventory, which is unique to ExpertFlyer. DL award inventory can only be found on Delta.com or a SkyTeam partner award search (Air France).

When we add airlines to the list in the future, we will send out an announcement.

Is there a way to search on EF for fares from multiple cities to multiple cities, similar to how we can use ITA?

Something like:

LHR,CDG,AMS to ORD,YUL,YYZ

Unfortunately not. ITA can do that because they have an internal copy of all published fare tariffs and flight availability along with the ability to price flights, something that usually only GDSs have and can do. Except GDSs don't allow multi origin/destination city searches.

Any active discounts at this time? Looking to go Pro :)

Hi nitrobass24, yes, ExpertFlyer has a Yearly Premium plan that offers 12 months of Premium service for the price of 10 ($99.99/yr).

I have a Hertz Business Account and wish to use the associated discount. However, I already signed up for an ExpertFlyer trial many months ago, and I notice the fine print states that the discount is only available to new accounts. So I can't use the discount to sign up for a paid account?

Use a different email address?

Except to get my discount code, I need to forward my Hertz welcome e-mail to ExpertFlyer, and that e-mail address is already tied to my existing ExpertFlyer account.

I suppose I could sign up for a new Hertz account too, but was hoping there was an easier way. I can't be the only one who took more than 5 days to decide to sign up for a paid account.

Since this is an account specific question, you should email the customer support team at [email protected] and include your BAP information in the email.

As per our Terms of Use, multiple accounts under different email addresses are not allowed.

disregard

KE Awards and Upgrades
 

ExpertFlyer now supports Korean Air (KE) Business Award availability, as well as Business Upgrade and First Award availability:

• First - Award (A)
• Business - Award (O) (From 3/1/12)
• Business - Upgrade (Z) (From 3/1/12)
• Business - Upgrade (I) (Until 2/28/12)

Hi - any word on when you might support BA and CX reward inventory? I've had a look at the EF site and it looks interesting but given BD is on the way out and I'm likely to be moved to Avios & BA it doesn't seem worth signing up only to get AA/IB/QF flights (the only other OW carriers I spotted when quickly looking at the list).

Hi Alan. We are always actively pursuing the addition of more airlines into ExpertFlyer. When we have additions to report, we will let the community know.

In the meantime, the only data source for the other Oneworld airlines award data is the airline websites themselves, specifically BA, JL (for CX), and QF. AwardNexus has a free version of its service for FT members that searches those websites and may be of help to you.

OK, thanks EF Voice :)

I'm curious about how frequently and when the flight alerts are triggered. Is it only once per 24 hours, or more frequently? I had originally assumed it was nearly real-time, but had the following experience yesterday:

I set up an alert to advise me when DL G upgrade inventory (at least 1 seat) would be available for a specific flight about a week ago as it was G0 at the time.

Yesterday, I phoned DL to book a round-trip itinerary with SWUs. The itinerary has six legs (3 each direction) and only four of the six had upgrade inventory available at time of booking, so those four legs were confirmed and I was waitlisted by DL for the other two. I had EF open while booking and one domestic leg was definitely showing G0 around 7.30 pm my time while on the phone with DL, and the agent also confirmed no availability.

Being a bit obsessive, I checked EF at 10.30 pm (about 3 hours later) and it suddenly showed G3 available, so I quickly called DL and they were able to confirm the upgrade (for two pax). After doing so, EF showed G1.

I had not received an alert about this availability, and only at 5.16 am this morning did I get the EF alert. When I checked EF, it was already back to G0. So I would have missed the upgrade if I had not checked manually and had relied on the alert.

So I wondered how often email alerts are toggled and sent - if only once per 24 hours, I would imagine one could miss availability.

Susan

Hi Susan, as stated in our FAQ (http://www.expertflyer.com/expertflyer-support-faq):

How often do Flight Alerts check for availability?

We have a proprietary algorithm that varies the polling frequency based on several factors, including how far away the departure date/time is.

To further expand on that, alerts check at minimum several times a day. The purpose of the alerts is to check the inventory a) when you can't and b) on a regular basis as most people would forget to. If you happen to find the inventory before the next alert check runs because you are also checking manually, that's great, but it doesn't mean that the alert isn't working. As you noted, you were notified anyway.

Also you probably wouldn't have missed the upgrade, the only reason it was G0 the next time you logged in and checked was because you had already taken 2 upgrades previously. If you didn't, there would likely have been upgrade space remaining.

I was checking KE "O" award inventory last night for AKL-ICN and ICN-LAX last night with lots available. This morning, no KE "O" availability at all. Seems to be an EF issue because Delta can see the award inventory when I called them. Sadly, Delta will not combine outbound DL flights to Australia with KE flights for the return as a single RT award because they claim KE: AKL-ICN-LAX is a "broken fare" (but that's another issue.)

TK direct access
 

Dear EF, could you please check if there are any problems with direct access to TK?

Generally, the information for TK is shown accurate, so no need for direct access, however, if direct access is forced, aircraft types is often '404' which reminds html error page. So do not know if can trust the results.

There are no problems with the direct access. Airline-GDS communications do not use anything as remotely modern as HTTP/HTML for communications, so "404" has no special meaning. For TK, direct access is used to be able to see availability beyond 330 days in the future.

As you can see from the direct GDS output, this is what TK is returning. It is probably something that they will fix, however the availability results look the same as the non-direct access method so there is no issue with availability accuracy.

KE O inventory is available again, please see our follow up post here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...l#post18123005

Downtime
 

Is there any way to get advance notice of downtimes? Sorry if I missed it, but if this is planned downtime some notice would have helped. If this is unplanned then hope you get it fixed soon!

Expertflyer was supposed to be up at 11AM, then it changed to 1PM, then 2PM EST.

It's back up.

Their site had info on it, prior to it coming down, that the merging of the UA and CO back end reservation systems this morning was the cause of the planned outage so EF could make the necessary adjustments. I guess things take longer than they expected.

Yesterday afternoon we put up a notification banner on the site that ExpertFlyer would be down for maintenance starting at 11AM EST. The site was available again at 2pm. Thank you for your patience.

UA/CO Alert/Saved Query Changes
 

With the merging of the UA/CO reservation systems today, and the retirement of the CO airline code, we updated all future dated UA & CO Flight/Seat Alerts and Saved Queries. The changes are as follows:

Saved Queries:

• Future dated CO searches were changed to airline code UA
• Future dated UA Award & Upgrade searches had their class codes changed to align with the new UA award/upgrade codes (what were the former CO award/upgrade codes)

Alerts:

• Active CO Seat Alerts were changed to airline code UA.
• Active CO Flight Alerts were changed to airline code UA
• Active UA Flight Alerts for Award & Upgrade class codes had their class codes changed to align with the new UA award/upgrade codes (what were the former CO award/upgrade codes)

Please take a moment and login to double check your Active UA Flight and Seat Alerts to ensure they are monitoring the correct flight number and class code.

In addition, the Award & Upgrade search now lists the correct class codes for UA (the old CO award codes).

If you encounter any issues with your searches or alerts, please email us at [email protected]

We've come to rely on some of the information and the more information/notice the better. (I didn't notice the banner saying the site would be down -- but the day before isn't a lot of notice.)

I'm generally a very satisfied user of EF, but this seems a little disingenuous -- are you denying that the predicted "back up" time displayed changed a couple of times during the downtime? I'm pretty sure that it did.

It also seems a little naughty to describe the downtime as "scheduled", which is what the "we're down" page claimed.

Of course people can understand occasional downtime, but if it's planned ("scheduled") then it would be easy enough to send out a quick mail in advance. Making the service unavailable on a Saturday morning (US) is never going to be popular, warning us in advance would have enable many people to plan their system use around the downtime.

I don't see where EFV denied anything in his response. You are correct that the notice on the site changed more than once as to what they thought would be the time the service would be restored. Having done support on my own company's servers, you make a good faith estimate as to how long things will take before you start the process. In this case of EF, the process was not entirely under their control as it was done at a time dictated by, and coordinated with, the UA/CO res system consolidation.

I found the site notice the day before about the scheduled downtime was enough notice for me. I also use it mostly during the weekdays for business planning, but YMMV.

Fares presentation bug from non-USD/ EUR countries
 

Some fares originating in non-USD/EUR countries are presented now in a strange way:

2 similar lines are shown - for one the currency is shown in brackets (USD) and for the other the brackets are empty.

Example city pair is NRT-NYC under option 'search all travel dates' and specifying TK as the only preferred carrier.

It would seem that is an issue specific to TK and specific to that route. If you change TK to NH, there is no problem. Change NRT to HKG, and again no problem.

If you can find another airline it happens on, please email us at [email protected] and let us know. However it looks like a problem with those TK fares that will probably be fixed the next time TK loads the fares into the GDSs.