ExpertFlyer Upgrade

[serfty]

Dear ExpertFlyer Subscriber:

We ask for your patience as we perform an upgrade to our site tonight, Monday the 22nd at approximately 6pm Eastern. The downtime that will be created should be at most only a couple of hours.

This upgrade is the first of two parts. The second part will be occurring in a few weeks from now and we will let you know at that time before it takes place.

This first part will include:
The option to specify a YYMMDD date format for your queries

The option to search for Flight Availability by airline alliance

The option to specify a second connecting airport in your Flight Availability search

The inclusion, if applicable, of day of the week flight availability information

Two improvements to our Flight Alerts feature
Ability to specify any class bucket or airline

The minimum quantity of availability for the bucket specified before you are alerted
The option to specify a return date in the Fare Information query to further qualify the results

The inclusion, if applicable, of minimum and maximum stay requirements for published fares

The beginnings of a new User Interface
We hope you will enjoy and find valuable this first round of improvements to our service. They were a direct result of feedback we have received from you, our valuable subscribers.

All of us here at ExpertFlyer.com thank you for your support as we start our third year of servicing the flying public.

Sincerely,
The ExpertFlyer Team

The server was not available to me yesterday afternoon, but it's up now.

 

[serfty]

Most changes to this product have been for the better, however there is one backward step in this new implementation.

The inclusion, if applicable, of day of the week flight availability information

They have replaced the Meal code column in the "Flight Availability" results display with this data. Previously on the Availability display you could look at a list of flights and see what meal service may have been available for a series of different flights on the one screen; to get this meal information now, you have to do additional queries and view the flight details for each and every flight you are interested in.

More than that, in regard to the "day of the week flight" data being shown, it's not really that useful being presented there. The flight only shows if it has availability on the day selected. Say you select a Saturday you will see list of Saturday flights. To check for flights that may run on a Friday but not a Saturday, you still have to select the Friday's date in a separate query.

Finally, this new day of the week information does not appear on the Flight Details query screen. In my opinion it would have been far more useful there.

For me, this results in my use of EF becoming time consuming as I have an Annual package with 'unlimited' queries. For those on a basic package with a Query limit they will find themselves using these up at a greater rate than before, especially if they are interested in a flight's meal service.

 

[NM]

Have you noticed EF has been very slow since the upgrade? Its always been a little for for the initial user login process, but then responsive. Today its really slow all round.

 

[NM]

I really like the day info in the display and find it more useful (and probably more accurate) than the meal info.

 

[simongr]

I think the alliance search is the best benefit for me - its going to be much easier to plan DONE4's now

It was probably slower as people j jumped on to test the new features?

 

[serfty]

I don't mind the day info either; however IMO it should appear in the Flight Details Screen as well as the availability screen.

Anyway I sent a modified version of the above post to EF customercare ...

 

[serfty]

Seat map icons are largely different.

:Free Seat

:Blocked (On QF this generally means an unallocated Premium Seat, exit row or Bassinet posisiton)

:Occupied

: Free Seat, Handicapped Accessible

 

[serfty]

I received a reply:

-----Original Message-----
From: The ExpertFlyer.com Team [mailto:customercare@expertflyer.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 24 January 2007 2:00 PM
To: <"moi"> (ExpertFlyer.com Subscriber serfty)
Subject: Re: Recent Changes, issue with meals and weekdays of flight Operation.

Thank you for your email. While we appreciate what your saying there are a
couple things to consider. First, the day of the week information is only
retuned with an availability query from the reservation system, while the
meal codes are returned by both the availability and flight details queries.
Therefore, to get both pieces of information to show up, it had to be the
way we did it.

Second, you might not see flights that only operate on other days of the
week then the one you choose, but you also know what days of the week a
given flight doesn't fly which may help in your planning.

The real answer to this is not to put in the meal information and clutter up
the results page. The real solution is to be able to click on the flight
details icon from the availability results and see a small popup window with
the extra information without having to navigate away from the core
availability results. Much like how now, you can save a query without
having to navigate away from the results page. We're working on things like
this for the next release, so hang tight. When we said that we just released
the beginnings of a new UI, we meant just that. Thank you for your
continued support.

Thank you,
The ExpertFlyer.com Team

So looks like pop ups will be the go ...

 

[serfty]

These new icons will take a bit of getting used to for me:

If you see the following it means seat 40B is free and 40A/C are taken:

..__A__B__C
40

& if you see the following it means seat 23A is free and 23B/C are taken:

..__A__B__C
23

 

[garyjohn951]

Slow, is an understatement. I have cable boardband and at times could have boiled a cuppa while it loaded an enquiry. Hate to think how lone it would take on ADSL or line only.
I gave up yesterday, will need to improve otherwise not worth paying for.

 

[simongr]

I havent found major speed issues. One odd thing is the days of the week -

I couldnt find flights from LAX on a Thursday...on QF that is.

 

[NM]

Slow, is an understatement. I have cable boardband and at times could have boiled a cuppa while it loaded an enquiry. Hate to think how lone it would take on ADSL or line only.
I gave up yesterday, will need to improve otherwise not worth paying for.

No different. The slowness is not due to link connection bandwidth, its at the servers and that is consistent no matter how you connect to the internet.

 

[jasonja3]

Like most booking engines, it can be slow, esp. when asking for three days either side of the date input. Sorry if am stating the obvious, but the broader your seach the slower it will be.

However, I also find it slow just loading the home page or logging in. It has always been like that for me, where ever I am. As NM mentioned, their server is slow getting the information out.

 

[NM]

Like most booking engines, it can be slow, esp. when asking for three days either side of the date input. Sorry if am stating the obvious, but the broader your seach the slower it will be.

However, I also find it slow just loading the home page or logging in. It has always been like that for me, where ever I am. As NM mentioned, their server is slow getting the information out.

The initial site loading has always been a little slow. And yes the complexity of the search affects the time it takes to return the results. But the same type of search that took say 5 seconds previously was taking 20 seconds yesterday. It does seem to have improved overnight. Much better today than yesterday. And I suggest that today its even faster than it was before the upgrade.

 

[ExpertFlyer Voice]

Greetings from EF!

I would first like to address the "slowness" issue you all experienced when we did our upgrade last 22 January. Yes, there was a bug in the new release that caused the slowness you experienced. We fixed it about 2 or 3 days later and it should be fine now.

I would also like to say that we have been taking into account the feedback we have received from our subscribers, good and bad, on the new features of the site. We listen and if changes are warranted we will implement them or revert back to the previous way of doing things if that is possible.

Lastly, I would encourage all who may have questions and/or comments about the service to email them directly to customercare@expertflyer.com as this is the fastest and most efficient way to get a response and to have the issue logged.

Thank you for your support,
EFV