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Quote:
Originally Posted by CommittedLurker
Again, I am talking about blocking award flight availability, not revenue tickets. The search engine on ANA for award flights is separate from making a revenue booking.
Please understand my post.
Sure, but when an ANA frequent flyer books an award flight that includes a UA segment, redeeming ANA miles, it's a "revenue ticket" as far as UA is concerned because ANA buys the ticket from UA.
So, making it harder for ANA members to book UA awards online reduces the revenue to UA.
ANA != EF.
EF piggybacks on .bomb data to sell EF's own product, while ANA is an official partner of UA, and is even authorized to directly issue tickets on UA flights. UA probably both wants and needs ANA to have, and be able to share, adequate information; whereas UA doesn't care about sabotaging EF.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UAX_Brasilia
Quote:
Originally Posted by GadgetFreak
Well, this is really annoying. What it does is make me more likely to book AA since I can track upgrade availability with them and be informed. Not that I need a lot to make me book AA anyways, but this is just another thing pushing me away from UA.
That makes no sense.
You'd rather book with AA because you must pay to view award and upgrade inventory than book with UA and view the information for free.
No, because it is easier to view for AA. And I can set alerts for AA.
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Last edited by GadgetFreak; Jan 5, 09 at 10:37 pm.
It's been widely reported on FT that Seatcounter stopped showing availability since they wanted $ donations to make it re-appear (e.g. it was a way to extort money by limiting the availability).
It's not clear whether this is true or not, but it still means there's $$ involved with the dissemination of information. Perhaps UA wanted to limit their liability since they know this data is wrong
A message to our valued users:
United Airlines has recently requested SeatCounter to stop displaying upgrade and award availability data.
UA is currently discussing the possibility of providing this information to SeatCounter.
If you would like to see this information available on SeatCounter, please let United know.
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Professional speaker, business and technology consultant, author... traveler...
...this seems like a perfect opportunity for United PR to chime in. I realize his/her/their role is not to address individual travel problems or questions, but what about relatively significant (to FTers anyway) corporate policy shifts that have no obvious explanation?
Paging United PR...
Exactly.
I am writing to the GS email (who still have not replied after over a week even after double-charging me for RCC renewal!) about this, for whatever good it'll do.
Interestingly, when I returned home from my last trip, I had a call from the AA ExPlat desk asking why I had not flown AA more in 2008. My answer: direct flights IAD-NRT and IAD-PEK, SWUs, easy upgrades IAD-DFW on cheap fares (albeit in ExPlus), big stock of miles. She replied with basically an ExPlat challenge - I can fly a certain amount in 3 months on AA and get ExPlat immediately (including eVIPs!).
I have a decision to make here -- either stick with UA and my stock of 1million+ RDMs that I seem to be less and less able to redeem, or shift to NH (C is far better than UA F except for the seat, and I've had ok success upgrading with miles to F on NH -- steep at 45k miles each way but oh what a product), or even to AA -- just suck it up and connect in ORD or DFW on TPACs but enjoy real F IAD-DFW.
Hello, United PR? I have spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on UA tickets over the years. Don't you think United should respond to threads like this rather than lose me and many customers like me who frequent FT?
Interestingly, when I returned home from my last trip, I had a call from the AA ExPlat desk asking why I had not flown AA more in 2008. My answer: direct flights IAD-NRT...
[...]
I have a decision to make here -- either stick with UA and my stock of 1million+ RDMs that I seem to be less and less able to redeem, or shift to NH (C is far better than UA F except for the seat, and I've had ok success upgrading with miles to F on NH -- steep at 45k miles each way but oh what a product)...
[Off topic and commercial, referral link deleted by moderator.]
I guess you can always hack .bomb and upgrade yourself to NH F for free since you are CarlTheWebmaster.
Quote:
Hello, United PR? I have spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on UA tickets over the years. Don't you think United should respond to threads like this rather than lose me and many customers like me who frequent FT?
< sound of crickets >.
[ RANT OFF ]
That felt better!
United PR is missing in action for quite a while since. It looks like my apprehension turns out to be correct, unfortunately.
Last edited by Ocn Vw 1K; Jan 6, 09 at 9:52 am.
Reason: See above
Again, I am talking about blocking award flight availability, not revenue tickets. The search engine on ANA for award flights is separate from making a revenue booking.
You know ANA tool is designed for ANA members, not for UA members. Hence sometime if you see availability on ANA tool but not bookable with UA miles, on the other hand it is available with NH miles. AMC and MP are totally separate programs. So why would UA block award availability for NH members ? Not unless UA announce they are going to abandon Star Alliance.
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This is very regressive of UA. Modern, smart companies value infomediaries like EF and KVS.
My theory is that UA wants to make it more difficult to redeem awards because they think that will make them more profitable.
If I ran UA, I would create web services to make it is EASIER for others to disseminate and use data such as seat and award availabilities. UA is taking the opposite approach.
I currently fly UA for 20% of my travel and use UA partners like the Chase UA MP Visa. I use KVS, not EF. If KVS stops supporting UA, I'd expect to decrease my usage of UA and related products.
If EF uses .bomb to access the award inventory, and charges for it.... If that's the case, then I understand UA not allowing this. It's pretty common for companies to restrict their websites to such use. The hotel companies do it as well. If you run a hotel booking site, you need permission from the chains if you want to access their rates / inventory. Most website restrict the use of such "robots".
However, I would have though EF would have picked up this information through Sabre somehow - I'd be amazed if they used .bomb.
Some of the special award classes are available in the CRS (e.g sabre), but they are hidden, and you have to force a sale to see what happens. EG: an airline will not list class X. But you can say to the CRS "give me one class X", and it returns a confirm or fail. That is probably how EF get the information...
I'm not sure if the Apollo CRS is still available (been a while since I had much to do with this industry), but that was set up by UA and includes all manner of UA info in it (even things like airport briefings to UA staff). I'd be certain it would also have all the award data. Perhaps EF get it this way.
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My EF subscription is up in Feb and I have to say it's unlikely to get renewed as this was about the only feature I used.
I suspect that what UA want is for us to book online and then take the upgrade gamble, with us knowing that there are no upgrades for months across the atlantic.
UA could easily have made the information about upgrade space available on its own web site years ago, but has chosen not to do this but allow us to take the upgrade gamble.
