Yes indeed it is. :) However, I tend to look for things as I need them. Besides I asked the question in the spirit understood by cmn.jcs .

Yeah, going with the soda analogy, it is like I never drink gingerale but wanted one today, so headed to my usual Expert Diner Groceries where I have been buying all my groceries. Turns out they don't carry gingerale, and I am surprised, unlike those who have studied their website by heart. :)

Now my surprise deepens because at places like Award Nexus these inventories are available. Given what I pay for AN, I doubt if they are spending big money on one single carrier. OTOH, you also imply that it is not a matter of money, but the carriers are refusing to let you pull the info? Are you black-listed due to some dispute? Or, is AN somehow hacking into the carrier's website without permission?

Fair enough. I'll send an email to each one of those.

I'm pretty sure that EF isn't going to publicly comment on their vendor relationships (I wouldn't if I were them). I'll point out, though, that EF obtains all of their information legitimately via paid subscriptions to various and sundry GDSes (the same systems used by most travel agencies). Thus, their information is very accurate and stable but can be limited if the airline doesn't publish a specific class on the reservation systems. In most cases, I don't think it's because the airlines are actively masking any information from EF itself but rather that they simply don't publish the data on the GDSes at all.

Many of EF's competitors obtain the information from publicly-available free sources but are technically violating the TOS of most of those sources, since those sources invariably prohibit any form of screen-scraping or other types of data harvesting. Whether that is objectionable is left up to you to decide, but note that EF's competitors tend to have to play a cat-and-mouse game with the data sources when those data sources change their interfaces or try to block the products from accessing their data.

Well said jackal, thank you. To further expand, while paying for GDS data may involve a cost and result in a limited set of Award and Upgrade airlines, it has unique benefits as well. For example, for all the airlines that we do support A&U for, we show the numeric inventory value in all cases. We also have access to AA (C) and DL (V/G/Z/X) upgrade inventory which isn't available thru any other website or tool as well as graphical seat maps for 137 airlines.

It also allows us to offer unique services such as Flight and Seat Alerts on top of that data in addition to mobile website access to all of the same data that is found on our full website.

We need your Vote!
 

ExpertFlyer needs your help! We have been named a finalist for the GBTA Business Traveler Innovation awards and we would appreciate it if you could help by voting for us. The People's Choice winner (the product that gets the most votes overall) will be recognized in front of the entire GBTA conference and it would be a great opportunity for us and our team.

To vote (open until June 30th), click here.

Please vote for Seat Alerts under category "Innovation Award #2: Traveler Comfort". Thank you for your support!

Flight info disappeared from experflyer.com
 

It was F0 A0 ... Y1 B1... before it disappeared. Oversold?

Oversold = can't tell for sure, there's no way of getting info on oversales anywhere other than within each individual airline.

Potentially it's all zeros.

What's the flight/citypair/date?

I see flights zeroed out on EF all the time, though there is no way to know the reason, whether impending cancellation, IRROPS, overbooking etc.

An oversale doesn't occur until the first VDB voucher is handed out, however ;)

Moved to the proper forum, and proper thread. /Moderator

As mentioned above, you can't tell if it's overbooked just from GDS availability. A friend and I had a recent AS flight show F0 Y1 before disappearing, but when we asked a friend with access to AS load factors, he said it was booked exactly to capacity with no overbooking. (AS per their official policy will tell you if the flight is overbooked if you call them, but it was easier to email the friend. ;)) The amount of overbooking authorized varies by route, time, and and (of course) airline.

Thanks guys! I am already checked-in to this particular flight(tomorrow). Upgrade has not been confirmed. Asked to be put on the airport upgrade list.

It seems that I consistently have issues with transcon redeyes leaving from the west coast once it is after midnight EDT. Normally, I cannot get flight availability information for a particular route anymore because the date/time are in the past from the east coast perspective. Is this a known issue?

Departure date/times are based on where the departing airport is, not where our servers are. If the information is no longer available it is because the airline is no longer making it available.

For example, it is now after midnight EDT (6/22) and you can still easily pull up information about flights that haven't yet departed tonight on the west coast for 6/21:

Results from ExpertFlyer.comIf you would like to take a further look at your specific search, please send us an email with your specific search information.

Okay, I just checked and apparently it happens at 1AM EDT. When searching for 6/21/2012 flights leaving at 12:00AM (default), just before and after 1AM EDT, the problem occurs.
Before 1AM: Shows all non-departed flights left that day (6/21). Everything seems fine.
After 1AM: Shows all flights for that day (6/21), including flights that have already departed (which, doesn't make any sense). Also, if I change the search time until 8PM, to only show the actual remaining flights of the day, it gives me a different list than the before 1AM search. In this example, the plane changed from showing as a 763 to a 757 and the departure time was skewed (DL 1406 LAX -> DTW), when the 763 is the correct plane. Also, the seat map is no longer available.

Anyway, this isn't uncommon behavior, and whacky things seems to happen at every 1AM EDT when the red-eye flights still haven't left yet! Thanks

The GDS we use is based in central time and 1pm Eastern is midnight central time, so the GDS is changing over then.

The error message for the seat map search comes directly from Delta. Since 1am EST represents 1 hour before departure, it could be under airport control at that time. Or, DLs host system just can't handle the time date difference at that point, either way it is nothing we have control over.

"Flight Cancelled"
 

I've not seen this before, but just now a flight search showed "Flight Cancelled" where the booking class availability usually goes. Did I just get lucky and catch a query just when AA updated its schedule, or do flights stay in the system for some period of time after being cancelled, or something else?

More oddly, the screen display shows "Flight Cancelled" but the "Share -> BBCode" shows it as x7 in all buckets (even P, which the other flights don't show).

Results from ExpertFlyer.comhttp://www.smugmug.com/photos/i-rCqK...-rCqKPwG-L.jpg