Originally Posted by
katan
" It also left the door open for undesired exposure that allowed automated scripts to scrape and re-display information in ways for which it was not intended."
That is the meat of this one right there. Undesired exposure certainly aren't the customer's words, those are business terms. UA thinks people are manipulating the system and controlling this information is the best way out at the moment. I expect since this information is in a relatively "public" system that we'll all just find another way to access it and UA will be left with another public bruise over something relatively minor.
That could have been easily solved by running a captcha for every 10 flight searches to see that information.
I know one thing this will do for me - it will cause me to make more calls tying up more agent time to ask for fare availability for multiple flights at once. That's going to make wait times miserable.
If they aren't able to give me that information, that's when bookings move elsewhere.