ExpertFlyer Blog

We now have United Award & Upgrade inventory

That's right folks, as of today we now have the long awaited Award and Upgrade inventory for United Airlines fully integrated into ExpertFlyer.  Click on the image to see a full size sample of the results for a UA Award & Upgrade search.

Now you can search for United availability and take advantage of premium ExpertFlyer features such as multiple day flexible searching, Flight Alerts, and being able to do searches from anywhere with our Mobile Edition (http://mobile.expertflyer.com).  Enjoy.

ExpertFlyer Travel Tips

Over the past year or so one of our founders has been writing a series of travel tips that have been syndicated in various publications. You can now read the entire archive on ExpertFlyer.com by selecting Travel Tips from the About ExpertFlyer menu.  Click here for a direct link.

If you have any suggestions as to what should be the topic of our next Travel Tip, please post a comment and let us know.

So why can't you....

A question was asked on a frequent flyer community website recently about why we don't have, or why can't we get, certain airline data that is available via some "tools" that can be found on the web. 

The reason why ExpertFlyer and any other website has different sets of availability of awards and upgrades for various airlines is because of where the information comes from.  ExpertFlyer buys data from the airline reservation systems directly (like all travel agents and other travel related websites) whereas other "tools" that are out there screen scrape various public airline websites.  Since different information is available via different distribution channels, one will have information that another may not.  For example, unique to ExpertFlyer is upgrade information for American, Delta, and Northwest as it is not available on any public website run by the airlines or anyone else.

To answer your next question, yes we could take the information from the airlines websites as well, however we choose not to.  Since we are a legitimate business that chooses to work with the airlines to create mutually beneficial relationships, we can't just go and copy the information from their websites, as doing so is a clear violation of their terms of use.  Also, since we endeavor to remain on good terms with the airlines, we rather not get on their bad side by hacking their websites.  One of the benefits of this arrangement, among others, is that we can get access to data that is not otherwise publicly available.

As for the other tools that offer some of the information ExpertFlyer does, since they are not built around sustainable business models, they cannot enter into (and pay for) business relationships with airlines and other travel suppliers.  As such, they are stuck showing what is already available on the airlines and other public websites.  Sure there are pros and cons to this or any strategic decision, but we believe that doing it this way allows us to deliver a superior product in both the short and long term to our subscribers.

EF changes in features and data over time

Recently on FlyerTalk a forum for frequent flyers and business travelers (many of whom are ExpertFlyer subscribers) there was some discussion about the features of ExpertFlyer and information that we do or don’t have.  We want to set the record straight on some issues, and instead of posting a long reply on FlyerTalk, we’re posting it here.

US Air and United Seat Map fixes

Today we fixed a couple of long standing seat map bugs.  First, most of the US Air seat maps were not showing available seats properly.  This was due to the data we were receiving from the reservation systems being, to put it nicely, out of specification with how the data should have been.  We figured out a work around that seems to have solved the problem.

As we were solving that problem we came across another issue where in some cases a seat that was tagged as both "Occupied" and "Premium Only" was being shown as Available with the Premium Only designation when it should have been shown as Occupied.  This was especially evident on the United p.s. cabins where all the seats are designated "Premium Only". We thought it was a little odd that every seat on tomorrow's JFK-SFO flights in p.s. were empty.  So they are now accurate and usable as well.