V-Flyer

Hello,

I find booking my personal trips on VS time consuming. There are plenty of sites that quickly search multiple dates, cabins and destinations for the best paid flight deal but I've not found anything to speed up finding reward flights.

I've been working on a reward seat search tool in my spare time and have a very early version online at http://www.rewardseats.com.

There's some way to go before it's truly useful but I'm hoping to connect with VS frequent flyers to understand your experiences and needs when it comes to finding VS reward seats before I develop it further.

If you'd be willing to share your experiences on a short telephone call with me perhaps you could send me a message. Otherwise, any thoughts and feedback in reply to this message are greatly appreciated.

Dan

P.S. I'm new to V-Flyer so I apologise if this post is inappropriate but I couldn't find any posting rules/guidelines other than the copyright sticky post.

The Mods have approved this this post.

Great idea, but V-Flyer are not responsible for the accuracy of the information provided. Before planning any other flights, hotels etc. that may not be refundable, ensure you have confirmed reward flight.

Brilliant idea just at the right time! We are looking to book seats for our wedding next Summer and I was struggling to check for reward seats on the Virgin site - this was far easier and quicker, but unfortunately none available at present.
Thank you very much!

Might be worth testing it on mobiles devices - it's unusable on an iPhone...

Have just booked reward seats tonight via VS so thought I would see if the availability was showing on your site......it was and for the correct amount of miles This is a great idea and with some improvements in design (when the flights show as available the flight details are hidden by your search details-this could be my ipad) I think this would be an excellent tool to use across a number of FF mileage programs

I think when you start selling advertising space it could be quite the earner

That is quite possibly the coolest travel based tool I have ever found (followed closely by Tripit, Kayak and V-Flyer!)

Well done sir.

That is just brilliant, well done, excellent idea. Can't wait for it to be up and running. As another poster said could be a very nice little earner if you sell advertising space

Thank you all so much for your great feedback.

Indeed it doesn't work on iPhone. It's better on iPad in landscape mode but far from ideal. I'll try to make a mobile interface soon. I'll put progress updates on the Facebook page (facebook.com/RewardSeats) if you want to keep abreast.

Janeclar wrote:unfortunately none available at present.

Sorry to hear that, its so often the case :-( Would you consider an alternative destination or travel date if there was availability? Or is e-mailing you when seats become availability the only improvement I could make? I'm very interested to understand where (destination, cabin, dates) people have most flexibility when finding rewards so I can design the site around that.

Not sure about the ad space but it'd certainly help :-)

Damn that is awesome. Amazing idea and well played.

Don't just go for advertising income but get a deal running with the airlines that you feature, it will save people calling their "help"lines and may very well increase the amount of pax booking into premium cabins - everyone is happy.

Biggest question of all... will it be free of the VS IT inconsistencies?

Best of Luck with it

P.S - Just a slight niggle actually, am I being really thick and missed how to do returns or do I have to search a couple of one ways? If you can do returns somehow is there(or will there be) a way to do a split class search: for eg. book in economy and search for upgrades to prem eco on the outbound and upper on the inbound? Sorry but you asked for feedback

That is a really smooth looking and working site.
The only odd thing was when I clicked the 'contact airline to book' button it took me to my flying account not flying club account. Is that me or you doing that ?

By the way, having ads on there would definitely put me off using it. Developing and running something like this takes a lot of time and expense so why should everything be free just because it is on the web ?

Returns are not supported yet, you're not being thick at all! I'm thinking about how best to do returns. It'd be easy to just have you enter the return date, but often it'll come back and say "no seats available" and it's relatively easy to search for a specific return date on the VS site already.

Perhaps you could take a look at my ideas for return flight search and give your view at http://www.facebook.com/RewardSeats/pos ... 9344961713.

I wonder if people really want to be able to say "Find me any UC LHR-NRT return trip of 5-9 days duration in November" or "Find me any UC week long trip departing on a Sat and returning on a Sun this year"? I'm trying to understand all the individual searches and trade-offs you guys make when booking a trip so I can make the fastest search site.

joeyc wrote:will it be free of the VS IT inconsistencies?

I hope so but it's only as accurate as the data VS put out.

JCBR wrote:when I clicked the 'contact airline to book' button it took me to my flying account not flying club account.

I'm not sure of the difference between flying account and flying club account but I think it could be because you're logged into the VS site. We don't know anything about your accounts, we just link you to the VS flying club contact page but perhaps VS redirects you if you are logged in with them.

RewardSeats wrote:Perhaps you could take a look at my ideas for return flight search and give your view at http://www.facebook.com/RewardSeats/pos ... 9344961713.

Left the world of facebook a few years back, so sorry will not be able to oblige on that one. Will give it a look a bit later and if I have any thoughts that haven't been brought up I shall either post them on here somewhere or PM ya, won't charge too much for my consulting services

Again, best of luck with it

You can't even book a multi-cabin reward return flight using the VS website!!! As soon as you enter different cabins for the outbound and inbound flight legs the website throws a wobbler!!!

mitchja wrote:You can't even book a multi-cabin reward return flight using the VS website!!! As soon as you enter different cabins for the outbound and inbound flight legs the website throws a wobbler!!!

Ahh but of course, I have been moaning about that before.. hence my question to the OP about the parallels with VS IT rep.. lol. No pressure RewardSeats..

RewardSeats wrote: Or is e-mailing you when seats become availability the only improvement I could make?

Just noticed that... that would be a vast improvement!! Perhaps set a watch list kind of thing, for people to set travel dates and be notified when certain reward classes are released for upgrade purchase.

Not working for me here on IE8.

The page loads OK but then just cycles repeatedly and nothing happens -- and IE report errors on the page.

at240 wrote:Not working for me here on IE8.

I've fixed that. You may need to Ctrl+F5 to refresh your cache.

I'm really annoyed with myself for that, it's a schoolboy error. I even have cross browser automated tests but they use test data and this was only manifesting itself with real data. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Sorry and thanks for telling me.

Bit late to the table, but just to say that I love this as well. Definitely support the idea of a watchlist - for me, rewards are always rare because of the school holidays, so to get a notification as soon as they become available would be fantastic.

Excellent concept and I wish you the best in developing it further.

RC

That's brilliant so far. Only a mobile version of the site I can suggest which has already been said.

You should get a job with VS IT dept - Might be able to show them a thing or two!!

I actually like the idea of just searching one way at a time.

I am finding entering the route cumbersome.
I prefer to type the airport code or at least start typing the destination and it jumps to it rather than scrolling every possible option.

JCBR wrote:I am finding entering the route cumbersome.
I prefer to type the airport code or at least start typing the destination and it jumps to it rather than scrolling every possible option.

Thanks for the feedback, I completely agree with you that the origin input is not right.

In any web browser other than Internet Explorer 7, if you type the start of a city name it should jump to it. However it doesn't find airport names or airport codes yet.

I think "Where can I fly from?" is a use case that applies more to reward flight search than it does to cash fares and we don't cover that use case yet either - the list shows almost all cities in the world, not just those that VS or their partners fly from.

I'd like to make it so that only VS/Partner cities are shown in the origin drop-down list AND make it find partially entered airport names/codes when you type them.

For the destination, I also agree that the process is cumbersome when you know the route you want to fly. The idea behind the map rather than inputting a specific destination was to allow exploration of destinations and rapid visibility of what destinations are available for given dates. My feeling is that if the site takes a specific route (origin and destination airport) to search it wouldn't really do much more than the VS site does.

However, I'd like to make it so that when you know the destination, you can open it on the map and the search for that destination is prioritised. Hopefully that would improve the experience when you know exactly which airports you want to fly from and to whilst still giving visibility of availability for other destinations.

I'm working on return flight search and mobile support at the moment. Once I've done that I'll get to these improvements. Any feedback on the approach outlined is welcome!