/RANT ON

I also fondly remember when the OneWorld Forum on Flyertalk was just such a service - where information was shared among fellow-travelers.

This isn't done - at least in the open - anywhere near as much as it used to be, and it's to my mind a real pity. That TiredDoc framed his/her question as one that could best be replied to by PM is symptomatic of the problem.

Is the root cause that airlines really watch this forum like hawks, and by sharing info here, we're alerting them to opportunities they can extinguish? Are we just over-paranoid that this is the case - since the pricing we're discussing is anyway well-known to the airlines themselves? Who knows.

What I do know is that, increasingly often over the years, replies to perfectly reasonable questions from posters (across multiple Flyertalk fora) are some variant of: get a subscription to ExpertFlyer or KVS. While it's true that those two options are in the business of selling fare & availability info - the knee-jerk advertising of their services (instead of sharing of substantive answers) is a real drag, and hardly incentivizes participation.


/RANT OFF