Baliktad, Thank you for your feedback, we always welcome constructive criticism of our service. While we understand your concern, it seems you’ve made some assumptions that aren’t true. When designing the user/session/authentication system there were several concerns at play with regard to how the system works:

- Since we anticipated that our subscribers would use ExpertFlyer not only in the comfort of their own homes and offices, but also at a busy airport on the run, we thought it best to ensure that our subscribers’ private information stayed private. Since you could potentially see a subscribers name, address, phone number, the company they work for, email address(es), and some limited billing information, we thought best to be conservative and error on the side of caution. You may not use ExpertFlyer on a public computer, but other subscribers do, and we have to think about what’s best for everyone. You may not think it’s a big deal, however others do. This is one of the reasons why there is a session timeout. That being said, there are many web browsers and utilities out there that will remember the password to a website so that you don’t have to type it in again.

- Another reason is technical. When you login, the information about your session as you navigate the site takes up resources on our servers. When you log out, or the session times out, those resources are then released and can be used again. If sessions never timed out then the system would run out of resources fairly quickly considering the size of our user base. Just so you know, many websites do this, especially travel sites where information about what you’re doing needs to be tracked from one page to the next. For example, if you’re on an airline website and you’re in the middle of searching for and booking a reservation and stop for an hour in the middle of it, you’d probably have to start again from scratch when you returned. Same thing. Even if we implemented an auto-login with cookies so that you don’t actually have to type in the password again to login, you’d still have to start your search over again as your session information would be gone.

- Your comment about “protecting against lost revenue” has nothing to do with the session timeout. Each user is only allowed to have one active session at any one time, this is to prevent against someone purchasing a single subscription and giving the username and password to their friends. Also, this prevents screen scrapers from mining data from EF using automated means and then profit from it by passing it off as their own.


The DRM you refer to limits the ability of people that purchase music online from using that music how they see fit, playing or copying it to the personal devices they want, etc. Conversely, you can use ExpertFlyer on any computer/device/phone/PDA etc that you want, no codes or device pre-registration required.

When we designed ExpertFlyer, we specifically wanted to have a web based service. It allows the service, and all its features, to be available on any platform, and any web browser, including any mobile device, to people all over the world. It also allows the service to work behind the scenes, even when your computer is off, to do things like check and alert you to open general, award, and upgrade inventory (our Flight Alerts feature). We thought this was better then having a program that has to be downloaded and could be installed on only Windows machines and that only works for you when your computer is on. We think having to login to a website is a small price to pay for the added benefits... more of which we'll be introducing later this year.

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to ask us at [email protected]

-EFV