Originally Posted by
joelfreak
I really wish there were a service that would just tell me when ANY overwater flight has x number of upgrades available. Most of the time I am flying somewhere that *A cannot go direct, so I KNOW I am going to need to connect. I don't care where, as long as I can get over the ocean in C. As of now I have to enter in about 30 city pairs every day to check for inventory!
I would say "write it yourself", but, have you ever tried to screen-scrape united.com flight availability programmatically?
Auth: not a problem.
The initial GET request to compactSearch.do: not a problem.
The next POST to compactSearch.do (actually submitting a form from the page returned by the last response!): kind of a nuisance.
Following the next few 302s, including a waiting page: not a huge problem, but kind of a nuisance.
Simulating the "pop up availability info in a new window" function getFlightInfo() or hand-writing your own call to flightDetails.do: huge hassle!
Things are a little better on alternate sites like unitedairlines.co.uk, but perf is much worse -- it can take 5-10 seconds per search.
I can see why you'd pay ExpertFlyer $10/month to do stuff like this -- getting it right against today's system is easily an hour or two of coding, and each new update to united.com would take some extra work.
The upshot is that if you do it yourself, it's easy to write a tiny shell script to check twenty flights at a time and e-mail yourself when they change
