Originally Posted by
canadiancow
The typical seats.aero/cowtool/etc. user is a "FlyerTalker". We want to go somewhere exotic on a premium airline. If I search SFO-BKK, it's going to require querying basically every one of Aeroplan's partners. AC has no control over TG's backend. AC cannot make it bigger/better/faster.
Maybe AC has to pay Amadeus for those searches. Maybe they have to pay TG. Maybe it's not "dollars", but some other agreement that "if you have 8 million members, you can only hit our system 50,000 times per day".
And here we have thousands of people searching southeast Asia trips with one click, all hitting TG's backend.
AC might be able to handle it. They might even be okay with it. But if TG comes to them and says "you're overloading our system, and it needs to stop or we're cutting you off"... then what. AC did very publicly state that when they tried to launch a calendar[1] they received calls like that from at least one partner.
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[1] AC has also said they have tried very hard to eliminate phantom availability, and when I use other airline's calendars, I find it's very common to click a "70k points" date, and find nothing under 150k. Or vice versa. So I can't speak for how other airlines do it, or if AC could have done a "crappy calendar" that wouldn't have had these problems with their partners.
GDS/CRS allow participants a number of searches/queries and after that the counter is started. Airlines are probably not restricted in querying their own inventory at all, but when they query other airlines inventory, they are (probably) treated just like a major TA/OTA. Such restrictions also has legal reasons, as airlines can't snoop on their competitors inventory/pricing in a large scale systematic way for anti trust implications. (Remember that AC for example only has ATI for TATL traffic with UA & LHG).
Some search engines cache previous searches for some time not to waste queries which causes the 'phantom' inventory problems people have reported. Airlines also tend to protect themselves from barrages of queries from known players (Aeroplan & Lifemiles are on the top of the list of these) by either denying direct/generic queries (only longsell/manual queries allowed) or putting the office IDs behind the web engines of these players on customization lists within the
Altea Dynamic Availability module. Sometimes these lists are reset by mistake (example LX F awards available on Aeroplan), sometimes the dynamic availability is tweaked to let go of some award space that would otherwise go to waste (example LH F awards at T-14 or 7d). TG & SQ sometimes allow automated queries via the
Amadeus Altea / *A CITP system, but sometimes move to manual/longsell only. UA (Shares) and TK (Sabre) don't use the *A CITP directly as their CRS, but have complex EDI interfaces that communicate between their CRS and partner airlines' CRS or the *A CITP which often breaks down due to configuration changes on either end which don't get fixed with high priority.
Speaking of priority: the sale of tickets on the airline website is priority #1 thru #99. Getting rid of Aeroplan point inventory is probably not the top priority of the people that run the show and hardcore redemption searchers slowing down the revenue sales show are most likely not seen as the core audience. I'm sure some people at UA/AC regret putting the 'search for awards / with points' option on their general sales web page.