According to this thread on FlyerTalk, Delta has asked ExpertFlyer to remove visibility to its elite upgrade inventory, booking classes RU/OU. I’ve forgotten most of what I once knew about Global Distribution Systems (GDS), but I wonder if the well-penciled bean counters at Delta finally figured out that this was costing them a couple pennies per transaction? If so, one has to wonder what comes next? I did use the upgrade inventory capabilities of ExpertFlyer quite often, but this isn’t fatal for me. The answer was almost always a big “0” anyway. YMMV.
It will be very much missed by many, many frequent flyers. I hope that management at Delta will reconsider.
EF running a query against the GDS shouldn’t cost DL money. At the same time, however, if it was a proper GDS feed DL should be able to simply block those fare classes from being visible in the feed rather than having to ask EF to not display them. Something else is going on here…
I do wonder what is driving this… Like I said, not fatal for me, but certainly something I will miss.