Yapta Helps Find Frequent Flyer Seats

If you're anything like a typical frequent flyer, trying to find a free award seat on a flight you want is frustrating at best, impossible at worst. Recognizing that millions of travelers like you face the same problems, Yapta—the innovative online fare-tracking search site—just added a new frequent flyer feature. Enter a flight you want to take and Yapta will notify you if and when an award seat becomes available. And this service doesn't cost anything—Yapta makes its money out of links and advertising.

The process is simple. Log onto Yapta, enter your personal information, and search for a flight itinerary you want to take. Yapta notifies you if either the fare goes down or a frequent flyer seat becomes available at the lowest mileage requirement for an award. You can track awards in coach/economy, business, or first class. You can track one-way or round-trip itineraries, including itineraries that require connections. If you wish, you can also have Yapta link directly to an airline's frequent flyer program to confirm seats. Although Yapta's fare-tracking feature includes most airlines, frequent flyer tracking is initially confined to Alaska, Continental, Delta, United, and US Airways. Presumably, Yapta will add other big carriers as quickly as feasible.

At this point, Yapta tracks only award seats, not upgrades. However, availability of upgrade and award seats may coincide fairly well, so if you see that a premium-class seat becomes available, you can immediately check with the airline for a possible upgrade instead.

Yapta's new frequent flyer feature is easiest to use if your trip dates and times are set in concrete and you plan to take the trip regardless of whether you can get an award seat or have to buy a ticket. Those of you who are interested only in award travel and have the flexibility to plan your itinerary around award travel have to work a bit harder: Enter a separate trip itinerary for each feasible travel day and time. All those multiple entries doesn't cost anything, since Yapta's service is free, but you could conceivably have to enter dozens of trip possibilities to make sure of finding seats you can actually get with your miles as quickly as possible.

Obviously, you don't need Yapta just to check on the availability of an award seat when you first book a trip. You can do that directly and easily on most big lines' websites. Yapta's premise is that airlines free up additional frequent flyer seats as the departure date nears. Although Yapta doesn't yet have any hard statistics to support that premise, a spokesperson assured me that, in testing, the site was able to find seats on trips where travelers had originally found no availability. Yapta hopes to report hard data after a few months of actual experience.

I haven't tested Yapta on an actual trip yet, so my comments are based strictly on a look at Yapta's website and discussion with a representative. Yapta's record in successfully tracking fare changes, however, lends confidence. And the premise is sufficiently intriguing that I thought you'd want to hear about it immediately and maybe give it a try yourself.

In other frequent flyer news, Delta confirmed what most of us have been predicting since announcing the merger with Northwest: Travelers will be able to swap credit between the Delta and Northwest programs starting early next year, and the two programs will be fully integrated and combined by late 2009. For the most part, the new program will resemble Delta's SkyMiles more closely than Northwest's WorldPerks, including, most importantly, Delta's new three-tier award system and minimum 500-mile credit for all trips. One key Northwest feature, however, will be incorporated: elite status credit on a per-trip count in addition to the number of miles flown.