You probably know about ExpertFlyer from some of our past posts on using ExpertFlyer to find award availability, and may already subscribe to its premium service, which costs $99/year. Today they announced a free account, where you can set up a basic seat alert, so I decided to take it for a test drive.
Since I don't already have an ExpertFlyer account, I went to the home page and clicked on “Learn More” to read more about the seat alerts.
I was especially interested to read that you could set an alert for an exit row seat with a free account:
I then signed up, which was pretty simple, got an email with confirmation link which I clicked on, then logged in. While I don't currently have a pressing need for a seat alert, I decided to test alerts for Continental's EWR-HNL flight, since I knew the flight number for that one having recently booked it as an award. You fill out the origin, destination, flight number, airline, and class of service (which appears after you input the airline).
I first tried out Economy, and maybe it's just me, but I couldn't see any options for creating a basic alert. In fact, the only alert I was able to click on and create was a paid alert to select a specific seat, which is apparently 99 cents per alert. While 99 cents isn't that much, I was pretty disappointed that I couldn't find a way to create a basic seat alert.
Update: As Chris has noted below, I was unable to see any of the basic options because there were some seats in the back of the plane that were aisle or window. From a usability perspective, I would put the question mark icon right next to the greyed out options–it wasn't prominent enough for me to click on so I just assumed that the functionality didn't work. Also, and again, maybe it's just me, but I would find it far more useful if there was a basic, free option that allowed me to specify a window or aisle seat within the first, say, 10 rows of the plane. I don't want the paid “select specific seats” option, nor do I want any of the existing options way in the back.
The other thing I was disappointed about was that the Exit Row Alert (which I couldn't select anyway) was a paid alert. This is NOT how it was described in the Learn More section! Rather deceptive.
Update: Per Chris Continental doesn't display exit rows properly, so this wasn't an option for this particular flight. Again, I think any explanatory question mark icon should be right next to the box that I can't check, for clarity. Perhaps you could argue that frequent flyers would already know this about the flight, but in that case they're probably already using the premium product. I'd imagine that there are other first time ExpertFlyer users that, like me, simply assume the product is broken because things aren't displayed intuitively and/or we don't see the options we'd find most useful.
I decided to go back to the alert screen and see if it worked any better for Business-First Class seats. Surprisingly, it did: once I redid the flight info selecting Business-First Class, I was able to select basic alerts. In this case, since the Business-First cabin was completely full, I selected “Any Seat” for the alert.
I also noticed that by hovering over the seats I could see SeatGuru info. This was NOT the case on the Economy seat map; probably connected to the overall problem there of not being able to create any basic seat alerts.
Update: Per Chris below, the SeatGuru info can't be displayed when there aren't enough SeatGuru comments or if the aircraft type can't be determined. Again, I'd make this clearer and more prominent, since to me as a user it just seemed buggy that I could view these on the business class cabin for the same flight, but not economy.
After creating my Business-First alert, I was able to view it in My Seat Alerts. Note that with the Free Account you are only allowed one free seat alert at a time; any additional ones have to be purchased.
Verdict: nice effort to provide a free basic account, in addition to the premium subscription and 5 day free premium trial, but at least for me there were two problems:
- Significant functionality issues–I couldn't set a basic alert for Economy on my chosen flight or view SeatGuru info for Economy seats.
- The copy in Learn More needs to be changed–right now it's a bait and switch, and anyone like me who signs up thinking they can get free exit row alerts is going to be disappointed. Update: copy has been updated, and no longer includes “exit row alerts” in the description.
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Hat Tip: Gary