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.