"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.