ExpertFlyer: It can serve you well

By Joel Widzer

Travel columnist

updated 3:02 p.m. ET Feb. 14, 2007

Joel Widzer Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

Deciphering airfares is almost as difficult as understanding Peyton Manning’s offense. You have fare bases, fare codes and buckets; refundable tickets, nonrefundable tickets, upgradeable tickets and not. And, oh yeah: A fares, B fares, Y fares and blackouts. Well, you get the point.

ExpertFlyer.com is changing all that. Normally, I’m reluctant to embrace Web sites that promise a better travel experience than you can get on your own, but this one I cannot resist telling you about.

ExpertFlyer has been around for a couple of years, providing information by subscription on airfares, upgrades, award tickets, seat availability and other things that frequent fliers care about. When the company asked me to review the service a year ago, I said no. But recently, after hearing some success stories, I decided to take it on a test flight. Unwittingly, I tested the system to its outer limits.

The program works with almost every major airline, though award and upgrade information is limited to certain cooperating carriers, notably Northwest Airlines and American Airlines (for awards and upgrades) and Delta Air Lines (for upgrades). My particular quest was to search the availability of international upgrades on my preferred airline, Delta. Only after meeting with ExpertFlyer’s president, Chris Lopinto, did I learn that this is the program’s most daunting task, due to a quirk in how Delta provides information.

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In technical terms, I was looking for flights that had “Z” availability, i.e., seats in the BusinessElite section which would allow me to use Delta PMU certificates or frequent-flier miles. Before using the program I spent a few hours on the phone with a Delta representative searching for a flight from Orange County, Calif., to Santiago, Chile. I tried every imaginable option, switching dates, flying into Buenos Aires — even connecting through Sao Paulo.

Not getting anywhere, I powered up ExpertFlyer to see if it was up to the task.

What I found amazed me. Right there on the screen I saw “Z2” — meaning that two Z seats were available on the flights I wanted. Immediately I called Delta, this time with the information I needed. I specified the flights I was interested in and this time the answer was “Yes, sir.”

“OK, lucky break,” I thought. So I did a search on another route. Again, ExpertFlyer listed seats with upgrade availability, and Delta confirmed the result.

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