Here are two possibilities:

1. People have F tickets, but have not chosen their seats
2. Flight is oversold, and any available F seats are being held for forced upgrades

That was quick. OK I understand #1 and #2 if there are say 3-4 seats open in the seatmap but sometimes like today SNA-DFW I am seeing 7+ seats open but F0.

Looked at things in EF again. Actually #2 makes sense. Most flights are showing Y0,Y1 etc (Mon, Sun) etc. Dont know whats going on with this route but I would buy stock in AA and switch flying to some other airline if this keeps up.

Which flight are you referring to? Once the flight goes under airport control, changes in the seat maps or availability may not be reflected back into the GDS.

Do they go under airport control at T-24?

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?