Uh-Oh: UA Award and Upgrade Availability Gone from EF?

[GUWonder]

Originally Posted by andrewwm

As usual, I think the nefarious answer is less likely than one based on turf-fighting and lack of imagination/risk taking.

I think it's a mix of all three.

[ExpertFlyer Voice]

We appreciate the comments posted by United PR. (S)he may not be aware that our efforts to come to a formal agreement with UA go back many years to when ExpertFlyer first started and each time discussions were started through various contacts they terminated without any explanation nor resolution. I would also point out that we have entered into a formal agreement with another major carrier to everyone's benefit.

We have always understood that the award and upgrade information of UA is of particular importance to them which is why we pursued, and continue to pursue, an arrangement to the mutual benefit of UA, ExpertFlyer and most importantly our common customers. But it was UA's indifference to the dissemination of that same information by Yapta, KVS and Seatcounter (are their others?) that lead us to believe we could add value beyond those sites, and UA's own site, by presenting it on ExpertFlyer together with the unique features that we offer such as Flight Alerts and mobile access.

Once UA made it clear to us they wanted us not show this information we removed it with the intent of once again forming a relationship with UA to everyone's benefit. We continue to hope that UA will be open to at least actively exploring ideas that will benefit UA, their passengers and ExpertFlyer beyond what is possible with UA's own website.

On a final note, we would like to thank all those of you who have responded to our request for emails. We have passed them on to UA and they have definitely gotten their attention.

Let's all hope for the best.

[osxanalyst]

EF Voice,

With all due respect, the availability to search upgrade inventory is a major benefit of your service. Should this continue to be available via KVS, then I will obviously have to reassess my flight data vendor.

[mgs 1k]

United is trying to make things difficult for frequent flyers.

Thank you for your email. The message below was sent to our users a couple weeks ago:

We believe that having an open line of communication with our customers is essential, as such we wanted to let you know that United award & upgrade information will unfortunately no longer be available on ExpertFlyer.com. Earlier this week we received a call from United asking us to remove the United award and upgrade data from ExpertFlyer. Since we believe it is important to maintain an amicable relationship with the airlines, we have complied with their request.

We were told by United that no other service or website outside of the United call center, its Star Alliance partners and United.com is authorized to have access to their award and upgrade information. We are perusing a formal arrangement with United to be able to show the award and upgrade information in the future, and should that happen, we will notify our subscribers.

However for now, United award and upgrade classes have been removed from our Award & Upgrade search tool and any United award or upgrade Flight Alerts will no longer work. Any existing United award or upgrade saved queries may still continue to work until the search date becomes invalid, however new ones cannot be created.

To help to make our case with United, we have setup a special email address, testimonials@expertflyer.com If you have not already done so, please send to this email address your stories about how having UA award and upgrade data on ExpertFlyer has helped you in the past, and the benefit you receive from continuing to have the inventory data available on ExpertFlyer. We will forward these emails directly to our management contact at United.

As always, thank you for your understanding and support. If you have any questions please let us know.

Thank you,
The ExpertFlyer.com Team

[omegadeal]

I think I just had the shortest lived EF subscription ever as I signed up and canceled within five minutes after finding out the UA award info isn't included anymore

I know how to search award availability on UA.com, but now that I will be making 1K this year I wanted to search some SWU availability. Is there a way to do that online?

[fradoc]

Originally Posted by omegadeal

I think I just had the shortest lived EF subscription ever as I signed up and canceled within five minutes after finding out the UA award info isn't included anymore

I know how to search award availability on UA.com, but now that I will be making 1K this year I wanted to search some SWU availability. Is there a way to do that online?

You mean NF/NC availabilty? Could be done on .bomb as well. If you did not already do so, switch to "expert mode" in the profile and do a standard award search. Also NC and NF will be displayed.