Flight Availability: How Many Open Seats Are There?ĮxpertFlyer’s ability to search for Flight Availability is distinct from its award availability function. One last thing to say about the award availability and seat alert functions: while ExpertFlyer’s coverage of major airlines is pretty comprehensive (including pretty much all Star Alliance members), there are a few notable absentees, such as Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, and Qatar Airways. Letting you know if the amount of seats remaining falls below a certain amount, which may be useful when you’re monitoring an award flight closely, but not quite ready to book it yet Monitoring for award seats that typically get released on a set schedule, such as Lufthansa First Class seats at T-15
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Monitoring for business class space after you’ve booked an economy class flight on a mixed-cabin itinerary, so that you can upgrade that segment for free We’ll set up the search…īesides helping you continuously check for hard-to-obtain award space, other potential uses of seat alerts might include: If there’s space on that one, then we’re golden. The direct flight on EVA Air didn’t quite work out, so let’s check ANA, which has a direct flight to Tokyo Haneda. You’ll have to run a separate search for YVR–SEA on this date, specifying Air Canada as the airline, in order to verify the existence of award space and that you can in fact book the two flights together. You’ll notice there’s neither a “Yes” nor a “No” in those rows! …but before you do, note that these additional results are accompanied with connecting flights on airlines other than the one you searched for (EVA Air), and that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s award space on these connecting flights. In fact, one of the flights from Seattle shows space available, so you may be getting excited to book it… As you can see, for our EVA Air search, ExpertFlyer has searched for YVR–TPE, but also NRT–TPE, SEA–TPE, SFO–TPE, etc. For other airlines, you won’t have to specify this – ExpertFlyer will simply return the number of seats available.įor certain airlines, ExpertFlyer will also search for space on any other routes operated by the airline that can get you to your destination. As you can see, this is the case with EVA Air.
Let’s walk through some of the most important features one by one.ĭepending on the airline, you might also be asked to specify how many seats you’re looking for, and then ExpertFlyer will come back with either a “Yes” or a “No”. Paying US$100 a year for ExpertFlyer is already hugely worthwhile paying US$20, for example, would be an absolute steal.ĮxpertFlyer’s suite of features are divided into eight key sections, accessible via the sidebar on the left. Instead, if you find yourself put off by the upfront cost, I recommend splitting the US$99.99 annual subscription with other people.
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You can in theory “churn” the free trial by using multiple email addresses, but that’s not really conducive to setting up seat alerts that ping you whenever an open seat is found, which is one of ExpertFlyer’s most useful features.
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