gleff

Last night I was look at seatcounter for some business class upgrades to SYD. UA upgrade and award availability has been buggy there for awhile, it goes away and comes back, and there's a note on the site that says it's gone for budget reasons. But it was working last night for a couple of searches and then I got the message that I'd hit the daily limit on searching and it wouldn't let me play around anymore.

Today I realized on the KVS Tool site that they're offering UA upgrade & award inventory as a beta version. So I filled out the contact form and got the download link. Seems to be working like a charm.

Now, this beta appears only to be available to KVS paid Platinum users. But since I'm already one it was worth trying out and a great alternative to messing around with seatcounter.

Anyway, a most convenient addition.

gitsumjunkmail

Wirelessly posted (bb: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8310/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

Excellent news, thanks for the notice. I did not know kvs offered this.

WineCountryUA

ExpertFlyer.com has also recently added this capability

A good trend

thezipper

Yea... I used the EF engine to look for NC coming and going to TPE in Nov for me and my g/f and it worked like a charm... I also like EF as I can use the mobile version on my iPod Touch

nzpilot

Great aid in simplifying the hunt.
I like KVS if I have not booked and want to see fare & UG availability in one place.
Once I have booked, I like the look of EF in checking for UGs. V cool assist in reducing the click factor....^

yevlesh2

I had no idea KVS offered this functionality, thanks for the heads up. Just requested the download link.

travelsavant

Thanks! Just signed up as booking award travel has become my favorite hobby & this is a very good tool!

anc-ord772

.... this is sweeeeet....

ryan182

got the link today, its pretty quick in showing results too^^

Thunderroad

Stupid question: What's KVS? The site itself indicates what it is, but doesn't seem to provide a background on the service. Is it basically a for-profit service that provides various flight, award and other FF info?

ryan182

Well I think the "lite" version is free but its also quite limited, I find the platinum service to be extremely useful, you can search all the GDSs, show availability for flights including fare buckets (now including upgrade/award), show all available fares for a route and fare rules, seat maps, and award availability. The award availability uses the ANA tool, I would guess its screen scraping but it seems far faster than acutally using the ANA website, also its a fun way to self inflict great amounts of frustration when your looking at a '+' next to a flight but the CSR on the phone is saying nope.

More than once it has saved me in irrops, when a flight cancels I can quickly dump all the available flights and call 1K with: and here is the fix I want, vs blindly hoping they are giving you the best option.

gleff

There are two basic tools that folks use here on Flyertalk, ExpertFlyer and KVS, and each have their various strengths and weaknesses. KVS pulls all its data from publicly available websites, though I do find it MUCH more convenient to have it all on a single screen (and storing PNR information rather than logging into the various websites). Great time saver.

Both expert flyer and KVS tool are maintained by Flyertalkers, and both (at least in the most useful versions) come at a price. KVS Platinum is $30 for 6 months IIRC.

ozstamps

I still can't understand why seatcounter (also run by a FT'ers IIRC?) doesn't get a little pro-active, and add a paypal link or something to get some bucks in for anyone who simply wants to see upgrade and award availability ... and overall bookings in the classes.

24/7 with no flakiness factor that has been there this last month.

I am sure some folks do want and love the all dancing, and all swirling extras and bells and whistles these other sites offer - but I for one sure do NOT!

That annoying thing that pops up after a half dozen searches saying you've passed the daily limit is just dumb.

I'd rather just paypal 10 bucks now and again when it assists me. I do not want to pay $50 a year for something I get free now and seldom use, but would pay $10 or so for seatcounter, the same way I always pay whatever it is to get FT free of those annoying ads!

seatcounter says after 6 tries or whatever their limit is - "go book your ticket via these neat portals and all will be cool and you'll get all the data you need" but they have no deal with ual.com so for me as I need to book there it is no use.

Glen

Eric Cartman

The new beta works very well! However, I have one issue with the manner in which the data is displayed. I don't know if it's been a problem for others, but UA now shows me so many fare buckets that on a three cabin aircraft, there is not enough space to show them all in a single row of text.

Has anyone else had the problem that the screen width is not adequate to display all the UA fare buckets? In many cases, the availability of "XY" (sometimes "NY" and "G" as well) will be truncated because there are too many characters in each row.

KVS, it looks like there is a litte extra space in the "depart," "arrive," and "st" columns. Would it be possible to make each of these columns a bit narrower so that there is enough space to display "XY" in a single row on the screen?

KVS

You may wish to turn on the FILTER, and specify the class(es) you are interested in...