Question for AwardWallet, since I'm too lazy to look at the code myself: I'm guessing you query the airline sites server-side rather than with client-side AJAX? If so, it should be fairly simple (and you should have plenty of bandwidth) to parallel-ize the requests. That would not only speed up the process, but it would mostly solve the problem seen above (though a timeout would still be a good idea).

Also, it seems you do background updates without use needing to manually update--is that daily?