ExpertFlyer Blog

ExpertFlyer now has El Al Awards and Upgrades

We have just added full Award and Upgrade inventory for El Al Airlines (LY).  Now you can search for  El Al award and upgrade availability and take advantage of premium ExpertFlyer features such as multiple day flexible searching, Flight Alerts, and being able to do searches on the go with our Mobile Edition.

United E+ and Premium seats now visible on Seat Maps

By popular demand we have added enhanced Economy Plus (E+) and Premium Only seating visibility to United Seat Maps on ExpertFlyer.  To do so, you must add your United Mileage Plus number to the Preferences tab of the My Account page which, along with your First and Last name, are sent to the airline reservation system during a UA seat map request.  If you have the proper elite status with United (in that you would actually be able to reserve the seats), it will return to you the enhanced seat map.

Of course, these enhanced UA seat maps are also available on our Mobile Edition of ExpertFlyer

Here is what a seat map looked like before (click on the thumbnail for a full size view):

 

And here is what the enhanced seat map looks like now:

Please be aware that the First and Last name that we have on file for you has to match the name on your Mileage Plus account or this won't work, so update those as well if necessary.  Enjoy.

ExpertFlyer now has Emirates Awards and Upgrades

We have just added full Award and Upgrade inventory for Emirates.  Now you can search for Emirates award and upgrade 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.

New Features - Award & Upgrade searching and Get More Availability

Today we're introducing a new search tool on ExpertFlyer - Award & Upgrade Availability Searching.  Now as you all know, we've had the ability to get award and upgrade inventory for certain airlines for a while now, but let's face it, we didn't make it easy.

Up until now new users had to look at a chart of the airlines we support awards and/or upgrades for (found here) to find the class code of what they were looking for, then they had to look to see if the class was "hidden" or not (a throw back to the archaic 30 yr old mainframes that the airline reservation systems run on).  Once they knew this information, they then had to remember to, if the class was "hidden", do a Flight Availability search specifying only that airline and the classes they wanted to search for.  A little confusing.

Well now all that is gone and we've made a drop dead simple way to look up award and upgrade inventory information for any airline we support, no guessing, no looking stuff up, just easy.  Now the folks who have been using ExpertFlyer for a while may be used to the old way of doing things, but in the long run separating our the Award and Upgrade searches into a separate function will help us improve the overall functionality of the site in the long run.

We've also made a couple other changes, below is the email we sent out to all our users today that has the details: