SeatSpy fixes Avios reliability and adds American and United reward searches

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• Ken says:

  22 Mar22 March 05:29

  What about existing members, can we access the discounted membership offers being offered to new members?

• Stuart Evans says:

  22 Mar22 March 06:33

  Pleased to see these improvements. Having just looked at a few routes and it appears BA have released no F awards for US West Coast, although B awards seem to be available almost every day on most routes. It doesn’t feel like any F awards have been snapped up, but more like a decision by BA. Does anyone have any clues as to what’s going on?

  • Anna says:

    22 Mar22 March 07:32

    There haven’t been any F seats released for months, apart from a couple of routes like BOS and BDA on certain days. Don’t forget they only guarantee to release J and Y avios seats in any case.

  • Jonathan says:

    22 Mar22 March 07:52

    Big reduction in F capacity with retirement of 747’s & replacement with planes with no or much smaller F capacity (A350 & refurbed 777’s).

    Add in the uncertainty over what planes will be covering specific routes more than a month out & you can see why they’re not releasing any F Avios seats at the moment.

    Unfortunately I do think this is representative of the new normal as BA have been saying for last few years that they want F to focus on high yield passengers not Avios redemptions & staff upgrades.

    • Economist_Nearby1 says:

      22 Mar22 March 21:01

      No one is going to pay for BA’s crappy F are they?

  • Lady London says:

    22 Mar22 March 08:03

    BA is removing First from all except major routes apparently. So SFO, NYC should keep some. Also a few other places like Barbados due to the nature of the route.

    • memesweeper says:

      22 Mar22 March 08:30

      I don’t blame them in the current climate — they don’t know which planes will be suited to which routes, nor what premium demand is going to look like. Given the punative cost of downgrading passengers — assuming they stand on their rights — I’d be keeping F costs high and cash only right now if I were BA.

    • Rob says:

      22 Mar22 March 09:53

      It’s not that BA is removing First, but that the aircraft with First have been removed from the fleet. Those that keep it have smaller F cabins than the 747s had.

• Peter K says:

  22 Mar22 March 06:51

  I think I’ve of the biggest gripes prior had was the lack of communication from Seatspy about the issues, when they might be resolved etc. They seemed to just be happy to take the money and do nothing. It certainly did not come across as a premium product.

  • Ed says:

    22 Mar22 March 07:08

    Agreed. At first problems were ignored with a ‘you’ve got it wrong’ response. Then it was, ‘up to date info isn’t why people sign up to the service’. Very poor.

  • DT says:

    22 Mar22 March 07:09

    This is why I wouldn’t subscribe again. They didn’t say anything about the service having issues, didn’t address the matter, offer an apology or statement of intent. Just continued to happily take my money. Seems like a very sub par company with zero customer service.

• Andrew Wells says:

  22 Mar22 March 07:02

  Sadly the VS availability is still very flawed as well and is accurate at less than 50% on many routes.

  Gave up on Seatspy a few weeks ago and have been trialling something in beta via one of the US blogger sites. Already a lot more accurate on VS and even Avios availability as well. If they launch it fully, then I think Seatspy will be toast with the current pricing and lack of communication to paying customers.

  • Alan says:

    22 Mar22 March 07:16

    Do you have a link/more info re this? Sounds interesting. A bit concerned re the posts here about poor CS from SeatSpy.

    • Andrew Wells says:

      22 Mar22 March 09:25

      I managed to sneak on to a trial as it isn’t publicly accessible yet. From a focus group call, it sounded like everyone (US and Europeans) involved found it a step up, including a couple of people familiar with SeatSpy.

      Hopefully they get it off the ground and don’t do anything daft like make it completely US centric / US carriers only.

      • Alan says:

        22 Mar22 March 21:23

        Will be interesting to see what happens – thanks 🙂

  • Rhys says:

    22 Mar22 March 09:28

    SeatSpy has only just moved to the new systems so you probably cancelled before they had implemented them!

    • Andrew Wells says:

      22 Mar22 March 20:03

      Still got an active subscription and it is still inaccurate IMO. My membership will be allowed to lapse though.

      It’s a shame as I was a big fan when it started, but the inaccuracy for VS at least, plus the lack of service has just not kept it worth the money.

• Lady London says:

  22 Mar22 March 08:07

  What I would really, really like to know is why did Reward Flight Finder lose its access to Virgin seat info. It was all going so swimmingly.

  Rob apparently knows but he’s not telling

  • memesweeper says:

    22 Mar22 March 08:34

    RFF was built on public (free of charge) APIs, I believe. I’d guess it just got pulled, either for overuse, or because it was never intended to be public. I spoke to one of the SeatSpy devs the same evening I saw you last LL, and IIRC they are paying for access, presumably through an existing network like a GDS, so much less likely to get pulled without notice.

    • Rob says:

      22 Mar22 March 09:47

      In non-techy terms, Virgin put a ‘captcha’ onto their data feed which meant RFF and SeatSpy couldn’t access it via the free API.

      • memesweeper says:

        22 Mar22 March 09:59

        Shame but makes sense

      • Chrisasaurus says:

        22 Mar22 March 19:28

        It’s not an API if it has a captcha…

• Anna says:

  22 Mar22 March 08:16

  Conversely, RFF seems to have ground to a halt and isn’t showing any availability after March 2nd next year!

  • GeorgeJ says:

    22 Mar22 March 11:12

    Anna,

    Dont understand your issue.

    Just looked at my two regular routes and they are showing @ 350 days out which is all I would expect

• Babyg says:

  22 Mar22 March 09:14

  cool good to know they are doing some fixes etc, i agree it hasn’t been the most reliable – i assumed it had something to do with so many flights being pulled/rescheduled. Even thou it hasnt been 100% accurate its been “good enough” and for me was still worth a cup of coffee per month..

• Peter Taysum says:

  22 Mar22 March 09:29

  Good to see the update, searches I’ve done for the last few months were pointless.

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