Originally Posted by ExpertFlyer Voice (Post 13985330)

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?

Originally Posted by GordonGordon (Post 13990452)

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:

Originally Posted by ExpertFlyer Voice (Post 14217362)

Originally Posted by dstan (Post 14224036)

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).

Originally Posted by ExpertFlyer Voice (Post 14224058)

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.

Originally Posted by dstan (Post 14225638)

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". :)

Originally Posted by Rom Sac (Post 14230492)

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...

Originally Posted by RichardInSF (Post 14230519)

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.

Originally Posted by Rom Sac (Post 14230492)

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...

Originally Posted by ExpertFlyer Voice (Post 14231947)

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. :)