Seat Spy First Class

[Albatross]

Is it worth upgrading to Seat Spy First Class from Premium?

[charlie]

@Albatross Let me know if you want free access to Alerts on FlightTimeCalendar. I’m looking for beta testers 😉

[Tom]

What is flighttimecalendar?

[charlie]

https://www.flighttimecalendar.com/
Reward flight availability & alerts for BA, IB, VS and more soon.

[masaccio]

Albatross wrote:

Is it worth upgrading to Seat Spy First Class from Premium?

I did because I wanted more than 4 alerts but then I have early adopter pricing so it was peanuts difference.

[Tom]

charlie wrote:

https://www.flighttimecalendar.com/
Reward flight availability & alerts for BA, IB, VS and more soon.

Thanks Charlie, I’ll have a look. I have first class seat spy so might not be that useful for me.

[Tom]

It looks good Charlie. I like that you can see individual flights on each day, how many seats on each at a glance. I also like that clicking in you can see aircraft type. I couldn’t see how to set up alerts.

[Tom]

Found some issues with inaccurate data for AMS to LCY though. Not showing some seats that are available and showing some flights that don’t even exist. Would be happy to send you details if you want.

[lev441]

charlie wrote:

@Albatross Let me know if you want free access to Alerts on FlightTimeCalendar. I’m looking for beta testers 😉

I’m happy to be a Beta tester!

[nike85]

lev441 wrote:

charlie wrote:

@Albatross Let me know if you want free access to Alerts on FlightTimeCalendar. I’m looking for beta testers 😉

I’m happy to be a Beta tester!

likewise! nickings at gmail

[charlie]

@Tom
– send me an email: charlie @ the domain and I’ll enable alerts for you try
– availability data is between 0 and 5minutes delayed – the data comes direct from BA so should be very very accurate
– schedule data is quite expensive but I’m rolling out a change in ~2 weeks which will help

@lev441
– super; drop me an email 🙂

[Wiseoldman]

also sent you an email

[Retron]

Albatross wrote:

Is it worth upgrading to Seat Spy First Class from Premium?

Depends entirely on how much time you have.

I’d not consider it worthwhile, or any of the scraper sites for that matter, as they won’t be as up-to-date as just checking on BA’s site.

My last First flights, earlier this year, were found by simply searching on BA’s site a few times a day; as it happens both flights had availability at half three in the morning, as I checked when I got up. My previous First flights in the years running up to Covid were found the same way, or by logging on at midnight/1 AM.

Incidentally I’m surprised that BA allow the scraper sites to do what they do – as they will be using accounts to repeatedly check every date for every flight, on a repeating cycle. If there’s money to be made from it you’d have thought BA would have offered the option for cash (perhaps delaying by 15 minutes or so for alerts), or maybe restrict the number of searches per account to a certain number per day (or per hour, per minute etc).

[VinZ]

charlie wrote:

@Albatross Let me know if you want free access to Alerts on FlightTimeCalendar. I’m looking for beta testers 😉

Me too please! I’ma first class subscriber with Seat Spy but they’ve been painfully slow at implementing individual flight tracking!

[Tom]

Retron wrote:

Incidentally I’m surprised that BA allow the scraper sites to do what they do – as they will be using accounts to repeatedly check every date for every flight, on a repeating cycle. If there’s money to be made from it you’d have thought BA would have offered the option for cash (perhaps delaying by 15 minutes or so for alerts), or maybe restrict the number of searches per account to a certain number per day (or per hour, per minute etc).

I would have thought BA charge for the data. They must have to provide a data feed for sites such as SeatSpy rather than SeatSpy manually searching each and every route every 5 mins.

Admittedly, this is just my assumption rather than any specific knowledge I have.

[Retron]

Tom wrote:

I would have thought BA charge for the data. They must have to provide a data feed for sites such as SeatSpy rather than SeatSpy manually searching each and every route every 5 mins.

Admittedly, this is just my assumption rather than any specific knowledge I have.

They don’t provide the data, so there’s nothing to charge for. You can see this in the likes of ExpertFlyer – BA simply don’t make the redemption buckets visible to any APIs, so they can’t provide award data (unlike with many other airlines).

All these various companies are doing is using burner accounts and a selection of scripts to send automated queries to BA’s website – you can do it easily enough in Python or PHP, parsing the page that’s returned, stuffing the values into a database and then rendering it nicely for their paying customers. You can tell they’re using burner accounts as none of them dare use a real account with a companion voucher – which would be genuinely useful, as it would show the extra I bucket seats available for redemption.

As I said, I’m amazed BA haven’t clamped down on it (by imposing search limits), or monetise it themselves.

[TS77]

charlie wrote:

@Albatross Let me know if you want free access to Alerts on FlightTimeCalendar. I’m looking for beta testers 😉

Also happy to beta test.

[pappap647]

Seat Spy doesnt appear to be showing ANY first class seats for any route for the entire year ahead with BA.