SeatSpy checks for BA availability once every 2-3 hours

[dannyhk]

Having waited nearly three hours yesterday for SeatSpy to send me an alert about the new Avios availability which I already found for myself on BA.com early yesterday morning (and sucessfully booked one of the four seats available) and having previously read several comments in these forums about SeatSpy being slow sending out alerts, I decided to run some tests for myself. I’m currently a First Class member of SeatSpy as well as a Gold member of RewardFlightFinder, both of which advertise “instant” availability alerts for this tier of membership. However its important to note that “instant” only means instant from when these seats first find out about the availability, not instant from when the seats actually become available.

To test how fast these different methods really are I added availability alerts for two Avios bookings which I needed to cancel in both SeatSpy and RewardFlightFinder as well as the Avios app. Then I cancelled the bookings one by one, checked the seats had gone back into Avios inventory on BA.com and waited to see how long it would take before the alerts started rolling in.

In both cases SeatSpy was the winner, alerting me 45 minutes after I cancelled the first booking and 1 hour 20 minutes after I cancelled the second booking. But the Avios app came in a (reasonably) close second, alerting me 90 minutes after I cancelled the first booking and 1 hour 50 minutes after I cancelled the second booking. RewardFlightFinder’s performance was much worse. I never received any alert for the first booking at all, and the alert for the second booking took more than 3 hours.

Would welcome data points from others? Based on the timing of these two SeatSpy alerts (which were almost exactly two hours apart) perhaps SeatSpy checks BA availability once every two hours? However that doesn’t explain why it took SeatSpy almost three hours to alert me to seats which I’d already found on BA.com earlier in the day (and I’ve no idea how long they’d already been there before I found them). The Avios app seems to work on a similar frequency, since its alerts were also roughly two hours apart (rather bizarrely you can see the availability immediately if you do a search on the Avios app–but it takes much longer for the alerts to come through). For RewardFlightFinder, its impossible to judge since yesterday was clearly a bad day (perhaps they were down for a while?). But, in fairness, I should note that I have previously been alerted by RewardFlightFinder to seats which SeatSpy totally missed (presumably because they’d gone by the time SeatSpy next checked for them, since they disappeared within a few minutes of the RewardFlightFinder alert).

So it seems the Avios app is a reasonably good way of checking for availability on specific dates (one major limitation is that you can’t input a date range) as its not much slower than SeatSpy. But I’ll keeping my SeatSpy subscription as well since, while its far from truly instant, every minute counts and although the seats I released yesterday clearly weren’t in heavy demand (as they hung around in the Avios inventory long enough for even RewardFlightFinder to find the second one) in many other cases such seats disappear within minutes of the SeatSpy alerts being sent out–which means if you only rely on the Avios app you’d never find out about them at all.