British Airways Removes Award Space From ExpertFlyer
The bad news keeps on coming from ExpertFlyer. After last week’s revelation that Star Alliance searchability on the site had become much more limited with award search and seat alerts for airlines like ANA, Asiana, EVA, Lufthansa, South Africa, Thai, United and US Airways and a dozen more completely gone, as well as the fact that both Delta and United have revoked its ability to search their upgrade inventory (elite upgrades for Delta) the site has also just announced via this FlyerTalk thread that British Airways has hidden their award inventory once again. ExpertFlyer had just added BA earlier this month, but apparently that function was not to be long lived.
Though this certainly isn’t good news, I don’t think it’s really that serious either. British Airways recently dramatically improved the award search function on its site, so it’s a lot easier than it used to be to search award inventory both on BA itself as well as many Oneworld partners, and American Airlines’ is also a good search tool for BA awards since you can view awards by class a whole month at a time using the site’s calendar function. Qantas.com.au also has a great Oneworld search engine where you can search an entire month at a time and by class. So there are still plenty of good options here.
The one real piece of bad news is that you won’t be able to set ExpertFlyer award seat alerts so that if hard-to-find award availability space opens up (like BA first class from LA to London) you can be notified and book it before anyone else has the chance.
While I still think it’s a very useful tool because it gives flyers access to upgrade and award availability on a number of airlines, it’s discouraging to see one airline after another (or a dozen at a time) preventing ExpertFlyer from letting subscribers search their award inventory, and I hope that the site is somehow able to turn this trend around. In the meantime, there are still plenty of airlines you can search on the site, but it looks like we’ll have to do a little more legwork to nail down certain awards for now.
Check out these posts for more information on ExpertFlyer:
Using ExpertFlyer to Search Award Availability
Delta Elite Upgrade Space No Longer on ExpertFlyer
United Pulls Upgrade Inventory from ExpertFlyerMore Limited Star Alliance Award Availability on ExpertFlyer
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