intuition

I used to use amadeus tool 'Check my trip' a lot, but moved away to alternatives that offered a mobile application.
Now Amadeus have released an mobile app companion to their great CMT web-application and I start to believe they will deliver on their vision of a airline neutral platform for collecting and accessing itineraries "on the road"; With their direct access to the backbone they will beat any competition. (for instance, many of the competitors only track flight numbers, they don't track the actual PNR. Only if you monitor the PNR you can alert the user of all changes).

So I went back and started to use CMT again.

I was able to add all AY trips to the CMT repository, but soon and suddenly Finnair trips were not accessible through CMT anymore. Amadeus displayed the blunt message "access to this trip has been blocked by the airline".
Now, a few weeks later, it still doesn't work but the message has been modified to "cannot access this trip, please contact your airline/TA".

CX trips works just fine, so I have ruled out bugs in the CMT tool.

So now I start to wonder if AY has deliberately blocked amadeus.net from accessing AY PNRs, perhaps in a misguided protectionist's view to promote their own (not yet delivered) mobile app?

Anyone with insights or similar experiences?

Courmisch

Finnair bookins are working fine here. AF is the only Amadeus-based airline I know that blocks CMT.

By the way, in my experience the (Android) CMT application is utter crap; it just keeps locking up or failing. Also the calendar import feature is ridiculous (days only).

intuition

OK, good to know. I tried again, this time only through the mobile app and I'll be damned... It worked. After importing one new trip, the trips imported earlier appeared again.

The iphone app is no prize winner either. It takes 15 seconds to launch and 2 seconds to respond to a click. It has all the nauseating animations and semi-transparent layers that are the ios trademark of low usability.

However, if they are able to track changes in the reservation, then CMT still is the winner. No other app/service is able to do that. I'm sick and tired of being alerted about delays that does not exists and being asserted that my plane is on time, when in fact departure have been moved up 10 minutes and I almost miss it.

oliver2002

Myflights app tracks Amadeus and Sabre PNRs for changes: http://www.myflightsapp.com/

I don't have it but the VFT community raves about it. Specially for the mysterious LH 'equipment' changes that catapult you to a middle seat in the last row when the curtain between C & Y is moved.

intuition

Sadly "Not available on your market"...

intuition

I got a very prompt answer from the developer of myflights. He says many airlines started to block amadeus access to bookings over the last few weeks, and therefore he had to remove the app since it couldn't deliver reliably anymore.

So this strengthen my thesis. Airlines does not want to help travellers to collect their bookings at a central place, they want us to be forced to download their branded app, and only collect reservations for one airline. IMHO this is protectionism that will not work. Also, IMHO, those who makes such decisions are giant rectums.

Courmisch

Meanwhile Google Mail has gained the ability to parse electronic ticket emails and automatically import the flights into the Google Calendar... and will screw both the stupid airlines and CheckMyTrip.

(Note I don't route my airline mails to Gmail, so I do not know how well that feature actually works.)

oliver2002

Yes, they do pick up all the details for a convenient calendar entry, but at this point google doesn't check if the PNR is as booked.

lkrt

On a side note, I really wonder why the Amadeus apps for Android and iPhone are that bad. After all, Amadeus is the biggest (and AFAIK the best) reservation system in the field and thus, one would think their IT solutions are a bit better than what we have seen on our iPhones.

Check My Trip works fine, though! The UI could be better, but it works.

intuition

This really is the key point.

I took a while for me to grasp it, so maybe someone would appreciate me rehashing my epiphany.

Most tools grab your reservation confirmation mail and decodes it and structures the information in a way that is easily stored in a database (kind of object serialization/de-serialization of a webservice if you know what I mean)
But what they do is they trust each piece of information in that mail to be correct and persistent, and they store permanently what they see in that mail. For instance, your trip with AY69 is read literally and stored as
This is now perfectly structured for a calendar entry and so far all is good.

But we all know that AY69 close to never leaves HEL at that time. Also, airlines tend to move around schedules 10 minutes now and then.
This is where all the other services gets into trouble. They have trusted each piece of information to be correct "forever". They only made a blue print of your confirmation information and they have no (easy) link back to the original to discover any future changes.

Some of the do try anyway. And what they then do, is that they try to map the flight data they have stored textual, back onto published timetable data. If they succeed and changes are later published in the same timetable, they can catch that change and update the textual data in their own database. They still have no perfect link to the original data, and for each update it gets harder and harder to track changes.

What they have absolutely no chance of catching however, are changes in the reservation. Any re-routing, date changes, seat allocation, equipment changes you, the airline or the TA might do will 100% go unnoticed by any tool that doesn't have access to the reservations system.

CMT has direct access to Amadeus reservations, and the myflights app mentioned above apparently had both to Amadeus and to Sabre.

These types of services are the only ones that can handle the true need of a frequent traveller. You need have a link back to and full access to reservations systems, otherwise you will fail.

That is why it is outrageous airlines start to block access, because they are blocking the only solution that can work for a frequent flyer.




I guess they have no funding for this project. The outline of current app/service has been published "forever" in their mission statement. It has literally been years of no action on Amadeus part.

Gnopps

As previously mentioned AF is blocking Amadeus, and since a few weeks I've noticed Egencia has started doing the same for their reservations.

WilcoRoger

AwardWallet also updates changes in bookings - though they cannot track AY bookings directly, must be done via (e.g) QR. (But if you made the booking via e.g expedia, it gets tracked)

TravellerFrequently

Using check my trip, I get this error message for my AY booking reference:

"141 - The application is not authorised by the airline to retrieve this trip. (141 - 284) "

intuition

Yes, the block is still there.
I contacted Finnair 6 weeks ago but still haven't got an answer.

I've heard from developers that this disease has spread to many airlines with amadeus booking system, ie they are blocking their own vendor. It looks like the same misguided fear for abuse that hit awardwallet some 2 years ago struck amadeus. Very bad, protectionism never improved anything.

theBro

FWIW this seems to be working nowadays. At least I was able to import my bookings using the booking code to Check my trip and to My flights. The latter also just alarmed me about a seat change.