Usually more like a couple hours before the flight give or take. You said you were looking at flights for today so that could have been the case.

I have been trying out EF on my friend's account, and have decided to purchase my own subscription.. was wondering if there are any promotions going on, or any type of referral bonus?

We are not currently running any special promotions aside from our standard 5-day free trial and our yearly Premium subscription for only $99.99 (the cost of 10 months for 12 months of service.)

Seat map looks correct after gate cleared upgrades. Had 5 seats open till T-30

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/678/seatmap.gif

New "One-on-One" Blog Series
 

ExpertFlyer has just launched a new "One-on-One" blog series featuring Q&A sessions with top travel industry leaders. This month Cory Garner, Director of Merchandising Strategy for American Airlines talks about AA's unbundling of services, from the unbundler's point of view. Enjoy!

http://blog.expertflyer.com/expertfl...-airlines.html

Fare rules dont match for dates requested.
 

Hi,
I was looking at flight availability for a friend and looking at the fares and fare rules. While searching for a flight from RDU-COK on jul 16th (FRI), the first fare basis displayed is SLX7NCE on AC. The fare rule states:

FROM/TO INDIA FOR MIDWEEK FARES
TO INDIA -
PERMITTED SUN THROUGH THU ON EACH TRANSATLANTIC SECTOR.

Also, an AA fare basis SLXRIND displayed, has the same clause, yet displays the fare for the date.

Why is this fare displayed when the travel starts on a Friday? Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Jobinvk

We looked at this on multiple GDSs and found that the fare still shows even when date validated. It's *probably* due to something about how the fares are filed that doesn't allow the day of the week validation to happen properly. We can ask our GDS support contacts to research it, but either way it's the fares/GDSs, not ExpertFlyer. If you need any help with ExpertFlyer searches in the future please email us at [email protected]

Thanks for the info.

The accuracy of seat count at expertflyer
 

Hope ExpertFlyer Voice can answer my questions:

My company has a very good relationship with my travel agent (one of the biggest travel agent in HKG) since we buy a lot of international air tickets every month from them. When I find out the the desired class I want becomes available at expertflyer.com, then I call my travel agent immediately to change to the desired class. However, it happened very often that the numbers of availibility that I saw from expertflyer.com do NOT match with the availibility my travel agent saw from their computers.

For example, when I found that the route DEN-SFO-HKG on UA had at least 9M and 9H at expertflyer.com, then I called my travel agent right away, but they said there wasn't any seats on M or H class, and said they only had 3B (3 seats at B class, nothing with M or H). This makes me feel very frustrated and makes me think that the information on expertflyer.com is not updated. I want to know how often the information gets updated and if the information is live. if the information on seat count is live, then there shouldn't be different from what my TA sees from their network and what I see from expertflyer.com.

GordonGordon to answer your first question, all of our information is live and never cached, it is retrieved in real time as it is searched. We know that the UA inventory especially is accurate as we get the UA data directly from the reservation system that hosts UA.

What your travel agent is telling you isn't that there isn't any inventory in that class, but that there aren't any fares available for purchase in that class. Just because a flight has inventory in H or M class, if there is no corresponding valid, bookable H or M fare then it doesn't matter. Please make sure to compare the availability results with a Fare Information search to determine the valid fares for the dates you'll be traveling.

Also, is your travel agent US based? If not, there is a possibility that UA could be showing non-US travel agents different availability then US based agents. Other airlines are known to do this, however we haven’t heard of UA doing it. Also what GDS is your agent using?

Hello ExpertFlyer Voice, Thanks for your reply. What you told me might explain why the number of seat count at expertflyer doesn't match with what my travel agent see from their system. My travel agent is Hong Kong based and has special fare allotment with UA and many airlines. My TA is one of the biggest travel agents here and is mainly using GALILEO system & sometimes ABACUS as well. I don't know if the two systems that my TA is using have anything to do with the seat count in difference. You know I really have no idea what GDS, GALILEO & ABACUS are about since I'm not in the travel industry. :confused:

Sounds about right, UA is hosted on Apollo which is the US cousin to Galileo. Maybe it's the "special fare allotment" which could mean custom fares and custom availability to go with it. Either way, a good test is to see what you can purchase on the HK United.com site.

Kenya Airways Awards now available
 

As of today Kenya Airways (KQ) awards for Business (D) and Economy (W) classes are available using ExpertFlyer's Award/Upgrade search tool.

FLIFO Comments & Miles and Meals are back
 

Tonight we pushed an update that brings the return of two often asked for features:

• Flight Status flight specific searches for AA flights will show the additional airline comment information if available.
  
• All Flight Details searches again show the Miles and Meals information for flights.

This is just a start of an array of new and improved features that we’ll be rolling out over the next few months.

Enjoy!

-EFV

Great additions! ^

Thanks, and we also just added Aegean Airlines (A3) Award and Upgrade availability.

Is historical Flight Status info still available? It does not seem to be working for individual 6/29 flights at the moment, although I can still get the info by searching city-to-city (e.g., AA20 SFO-JFK).

The flight specific Flight Status search (for AA) and the city pair search pull from two different sources, hence the difference. The GDS (for flight specific AA searches) only has information going back to the previous day, which is now 6/30.

OK, thanks - as long as I can still get the historical info via the city-to-city search, I can work around it.

If this is true across all airlines, though, might it be worth redirecting individual searches (which is what I save in my Saved Queries) for older flights back to the other source? That way I'd see it as "FLIFO data added for flights on same day" rather than "Flight Status info lost for flights older than one day". :)

The historical data on the city pair search and on the flight specific search would be the same. No this is only for AA for now.

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is there a way to filter out responses to award searches that have no availability in the requested fare buckets? As it is I get a ton of flights listed that have 0 availability. I can imagine this information being useful under some circumstances, but I'd love to get rid of it and not have to scroll through so many screens full of zeros...

I requested this feature directly to the site and got a non-committal reply. Sure seems to me like it would be easy to implement.

We can probably put an option in the Filter Search Results drop-down box on the results page to remove any flights without inventory. It's funny, for every person asking us to remove the zero availability flights, someone else asks us to show as many flights as possible, even if they are zeros. :)

Having the option would be great. As I said, I agree that seeing everything is sometimes useful, but when you are looking for a rare award seat (as any true FT-er does!), the pages of zero availability are a pain.

I would prefer that you put this on the award search screen, though, since I really want to put this in a saved query (since some of my queries are for rare awards).

And if you do this option (I hope so), and there are multiple segments, show all the segments if at least one of them has availability.

Have been doing some PHP programming lately and it's pretty easy to do this in PHP so I assume it's easy to do it in other languages as well.

"Easy" is a relative term when you're dealing with airline data. The form in which we receive the data determines how we can manipulate it. However we should be able to do this and we'll add it to the list.

New Member Benefit Program
 

ExpertFlyer has launched our new Member Benefit Program which will allow select partners to offer various discount and offers to our subscribers.

To kick off the program, we have partnered with Hertz to offer the Hertz Business Account Program to ExpertFlyer subscribers. You can click here to go to the Hertz Business Account Program website to find out more about the benefits, such as the up to 20% discount on rentals.

Now when you login to ExpertFlyer, you will see a brief list of the current MBP offers and partners and there will be a link to a separate page with the offer details. To be clear, MBP partners will not have access to any personal customer information, including email addresses, for both current and past subscribers. All communications about the program and offers will be through ExpertFlyer directly, and only as often as required.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on companies you would like to see us partner with in the future, please let us know.

Qantas Domestic Seat Maps now available
 

As first reported here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/qanta...p-running.html Qantas now allows you to view seat maps for domestic Australia flights.

These too can be seen in ExpertFlyer, as long as you enter your QF or partner airline frequent flyer number for QF seat maps in the Preferences tab of the My Account page. If the frequent flyer account has elite status, you will be able to view the domestic seat maps.

Dear EF, have you investigated public interest for adding "sale date" to fare information?

That would basically provide access to fare archive and more importantly to fares which are already filed/ posted but yet being displayed as not yet effective.

I don't think this is difficult from the technical standpoint, but you definitely need that demand is demonstrated.

I'd like also to create demand for another GDS feature which is available from EF but requires certain technical work:

- booking classes for secondary airlines (in case the fare allows to have other airlines segments you will no longer have to guess or use ITA to check which booking class it books to say on LH and how many miles you will get).

This is called RBD Chart2. Users please let EF know if you need this feature and help me to get it too!

If I'm reading what you're posting correctly, this means that you don't need to input a date that a fare is valid for in order to see it.

This would be awesome. For example, DL recently filed an ANC-DCA fare that was valid from 8/17 through 11/17. I originally didn't notice it because I left the date of travel to the default. In fact, even once I got a fare alert from Farecompare about the fare, I still had trouble finding it until I realized the fare wasn't valid until 8/17.

For people like me who are largely leisure flyers traveling without regard to dates (i.e. I don't care whether I travel in March or October, as long as I feel the fare is a good value), it would make searching for fares MUCH easier.

Two other things that bug me constantly:

1) Inability to specify more than two connection points when searching for availability
2) Inability to set alerts across a whole itinerary (you must set alerts for each individual segment).

If those are easy fixes, I think a whole bunch of FTers would benefit from these improvements (what sane FlyerTalker WOULDN'T fly on four or five segments to get somewhere? ;)).

Thank you for your suggestions, however many times the availability of new features are constrained by the data that we have access to and the ways in which we can access that data.

It's not an issue of technical difficulty, it's just not possible to ask a GDS for a list of fares without including a travel date, even if you also have the ticketing date. A fare archive search may be possible, put again it would require a travel date as well as a ticketing date. GDSs unfortunately were built to return specific, applicable information as opposed to as much data as possible.

This may be possible, we'll add it to the list to research and prioritize.

1) The reason why it's only two connection points is because that's all the GDS will accept from us. I'm not even sure GDSs can return an itinerary with more then 3 segments as you can always get from A to B in 3 segments or less.

2) That is something we want to change to support married segment logic, however it is not simple. There are many issues and problems that a multi-segment alert creates as well as the increased input that is required when creating such an alert to make sure it does what the user wants it to do. It's something we'll give thought to after our current round of changes are complete.

Would you be able to subscribe to ATPCO's feed of airfares to have access to the raw fare lists rather than relying on what the GDSes return to you?

Makes sense. Can your system work around it by allowing us to specify it but your system submits it as multiple separate queries to the GDS?

Sweet! :)

Ticketing date

I understand that we always need travel date which is OK. But adding a ticketing date as additional feature with default being "today/ now" would allow one
a) to access archive fares [ie fare rules for recent EWR-FRA deal if one did not copy those on time]
b) to see fares which are already loaded but not yet effective (sale restriction date). this is useful if you need to check whether an airline expects to increase/ decrease fares. Usually fares are loaded in advance.


RBD Chart 2

WOW! Waiting for the expiration of my subscription to another source:) Please move it from the list to reality ASAP.
Due to current alliance tendencies more and more fares allow interlining. I hope it is not only myself who will benefit from knowing RBD on a secondary airline.

For example, in recent EWR-FRA people were guessing whether or not it books into W on LH. Once the issue is implemented it will be a piece of cake to check.

No, that costs over $1MM a year.

That doesn't solve the problem because then you potentially violate married segment logic and the results would be inaccurate and unsaleable.

As far as we've seen, it wouldn't. Adding a ticketing date doesn't make a GDS return fares that aren't valid for the specified travel date, in fact, specifying a ticketing date that isn't today results in less fares being returned. GDSs aren't really built to show information that isn't valid for a specified travel date. If you want to give us a specific example to research, we'll look at it again and see if there is another way.

We'll take a look at it after the other things we're currently working on are finished.

Yea, those are all good suggestions. Some refinement to the system is needed to take it up in the ranks.

It turns out there are a lot of very out-of-the-way places in the world that you can get to by airplane, and for many such points A and B you need more than three flight segments to do so.

A couple of examples pulled from our current flight schedule database:

1. To fly between Tenerife, Canary Islands (TFN) and Canberra, Australia (CBR) requires a minimum of four flight segments.

2. Of all places with passenger service, the points that require the most flights to fly between are Playon Chico, Panama (PYC) and Aniwa, Vanuatu (AWD). These two points require a minimum of 10 flight segments to fly between. Even our software with the default settings is unfortunately unable to piece this one together. Since many of the required flights do not depart every day, it requires over 11 days to do it!

Absolutely correct. Any two places that are not international gateways in their countries take at least one segment each to reach such a gateway. The entire set of international gateways in the world is not connected by nonstop (or even direct) flights; there are many gateway pairs that require at least two flights from gateway to gateway. Q.E.D.

(Local example involving two places I've been recently: Martha's Vineyard, MYY, to Punta Arenas, Chile, PUQ.)

In these cases, though, I would assume the GDS would return the most direct routing without needing to specify any connection points, even if it involved more than two connections.

I, on the other hand, was looking to specifically force more than two connections to construct a mileage run from ANC to DCA via PDX, SEA, and LAX. I ended up having to do two separate searches (ANC-PDX-SEA-LAX and LAX-DCA) to find flights with available space. I was simply looking for a way to get this information without having to run two separate searches.

In fact, I think I finally just gave up doing that and just searched for availability on ITA.

That may be, however the GDS can only begin to put a itinerary like that together if 1) the airlines required participate in the GDS and publish their schedules required to make the connections and 2) the GDS supports 4+ flight itineraries. If both conditions aren't met, then it really doesn't matter as it won't show the result.

Actually, this can be done with 3 flights on certain days. This example is for 9 Oct 10:

DE 6649 from TFN to FRA
QF 6 from FRA to SYD (arriving 2 days later)
QF 1463 from SYD to CBR

QF 6 has a stop in SIN, however the GDS still considers it one flight so it works.

Correct, if it can it will, if it can't it won't.

For ExpertFlyer to really implement that correctly, we'd have to create a way for you to add flights to an itinerary individually, then price that itinerary based on the specific fare classes you want for each leg to make sure it's valid. A whole different undertaking to say the least.