Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
Another potential reason and closer to what UA stated, had to with the frequency of queries. Some speculated rates were potentially a significant percentage of the total activity.
Amazon realized they needed lots of robust computing, and now they're a major player in providing virtual servers to others. Why doesn't United just monetize this, and charge a small fee per query to any account that makes over a thousand queries per day? Make it a profit center. If forced to "sustainable harvests", third parties like ExpertFlyer would use predictive modeling to determine which queries were most likely to learn something.
While the gist of this thread is that without tools our GPUs have become Confederate currency, what about our miles themselves? All of my recent award searches have revealed United's award search screens to be outright lies. This may have roots in incompetence as usual, but leaving it unfixed has to be deliberate. Scraping award fare classes is the only way to protect customers from this abuse.