Seat Alerts on Expertflyer

[Mal]

This was introducted about a month ago:

Seat Alerts - Be alerted when the seat you want becomes available - ExpertFlyer Blog

Seat Alerts allows you to be notified if a currently occupied seat on your flight that you wish you were sitting in becomes available.

Works well. BA has a habit of moving the curtain between J and Y forward as a flight gets closer (and also backwards too sometimes if J sells well). I was able to know very soon after they released my favourite seat that it was available, so snaffled it.

 

[MarcB]

Something to watch though - I tried to use this on a recent trip to the US with QF and because E/F can't account for your status, it often shows seats that are available on Manage My Booking (because of status) as being blocked.

I wanted to snaffle row 26 and although originally blocked online through MMB, they became available a couple of days out. I had set up E/F alert, but was never alerted because it still showed those as blocked on it's system. It was just lucky that I had logged into QF MMB to check and saw them as available.

Raises an interesting issue though - always good to recheck your seating a few days out as even seats normally blocked for higher status PAX (WP) may become available to us even us lowly GOLDS!

 

[ExpertFlyer Voice]

Marc, Please PM me an example of a seat map that shows Premium Only seats as Blocked and I'll see if there is anything we can do about showing them as Premium Only. Please note which specific additional seats you see as available to you.

 

[ExpertFlyer Voice]

Something to watch though - I tried to use this on a recent trip to the US with QF and because E/F can't account for your status, it often shows seats that are available on Manage My Booking (because of status) as being blocked.

This has now been fixed and if you specify your QF frequent flyer number in the Preferences tab of the My Account page, the QF will now take into account your status when returning the seat maps to us.

 

[MarcB]

I can confirm that this is now working. Seat maps shown on E/F now display as they do when logged into my QF Manage My Booking page. Great upgrade!

 

[NM]

This has now been fixed and if you specify your QF frequent flyer number in the Preferences tab of the My Account page, the QF will now take into account your status when returning the seat maps to us.

How does this work for non-QF OneWorld Emerald and Sapphire members? As an AA EXP member I also have access to preferred/blocked seats via QF's Manage Booking seat selection.

 

[ExpertFlyer Voice]

How does this work for non-QF OneWorld Emerald and Sapphire members? As an AA EXP member I also have access to preferred/blocked seats via QF's Manage Booking seat selection.

Right now it doesn't, only a QF FF# is sent in with a QF seat map. Picking which airline's frequent flyer # you want to send in to which other airline(s) seat map requests is much more complicated and something we'd have to look at doing in the future.