SEA1K4EVR

I was worried with the merger we'd lose access to UA awards/upgrades on EF...but it appears they'll be here to stay according to the email I just got:

Today we are excited to announce that full Continental Award and Upgrade availability is now available on ExpertFlyer using the Award & Upgrade search tool:

Continental Award and Upgrade Classes:
• First/Business - EasyPass Award (ZN)
• First/Business - EasyPass Award for Elites (FN)
• First/Business - SaverPass Award and Alliance Upgrades (I)
• First/Business - SaverPass Award for Plat Elites (O)
• First/Business - Upgrade from B/M Class for Plat Elites (ZE)
• First/Business - Upgrade from Y Class (FE)
• First/Business - Upgrade using Miles/SWU/Vouchers (R)
• Coach - EasyPass Award (HN)
• Coach - EasyPass Award for Elites (YN)
• Coach - SaverPass Award (X)
• Coach - SaverPass Award for Elites (XN)

WooHoo!

MODS: Please leave this in the merged forum as it clearly relates to the merged airline now that both UA & CO award inventory is available.

sbm12

It has been "here to stay" for a while now. CO added the "expert mode" functionality to the preview website back in July and it went live in late July or early August. EF is scraping the data from the public site to share with customers, I believe.

If you want to see it directly on co.com in a rather improved format (highlighting award buckets, all on display when the page loads, etc.) check out the GreaseMonkey script here.

Also worth noting that the ZE bucket applies to upgrades from B fares for Gold and Silver elites, too.

RobOnLI

The only advantage ExpertFlyer has now is that you can setup fare bucket alerts. Otherwise, CO.com offers you all of this data for free.

-RM

SEA1K4EVR

That's not the only advantage... you can also search in 7 day spans for specific award/upgrade buckets. You can't do that at CO or UA.com. This is the main reason I pay for EF.

Renard

This is a change I like... it's nice to have one or two every now and again.

SAT Lawyer

Although AwardNexus has been serving me well, I was very pleased when I got the e-mail from ExpertFlyer yesterday about the addition of CO award inventory. ^

rtwflyer

that for star alliance awards from other schemes (e.g. BMI) the relevent codes are I for business/business first etc. and X for economy?

thanks!

joelfreak

I really wish there were a service that would just tell me when ANY overwater flight has x number of upgrades available. Most of the time I am flying somewhere that *A cannot go direct, so I KNOW I am going to need to connect. I don't care where, as long as I can get over the ocean in C. As of now I have to enter in about 30 city pairs every day to check for inventory!

mherdeg

I would say "write it yourself", but, have you ever tried to screen-scrape united.com flight availability programmatically?

Auth: not a problem.
The initial GET request to compactSearch.do: not a problem.
The next POST to compactSearch.do (actually submitting a form from the page returned by the last response!): kind of a nuisance.
Following the next few 302s, including a waiting page: not a huge problem, but kind of a nuisance.
Simulating the "pop up availability info in a new window" function getFlightInfo() or hand-writing your own call to flightDetails.do: huge hassle!

Things are a little better on alternate sites like unitedairlines.co.uk, but perf is much worse -- it can take 5-10 seconds per search.

I can see why you'd pay ExpertFlyer $10/month to do stuff like this -- getting it right against today's system is easily an hour or two of coding, and each new update to united.com would take some extra work.

The upshot is that if you do it yourself, it's easy to write a tiny shell script to check twenty flights at a time and e-mail yourself when they change