Originally Posted by
canadiancow
There's the legal aspect, the ethical aspect, and the practical aspect.
Or, as my old boss used to say, "In any disagerement, there's what actually happened, there's how the other guy feels about it, and then there's what he's going to want to DO about it, and as often as not those will be three different things."
Cow's right on the money with this assessment:
Originally Posted by
canadiancow
The typical Aeroplan customer is a FOTSG who lives in Canada. Presumably most of their family are in Canada. Their searches are YYJ-YHZ or similar. Those searches can be done within AC's system. There are costs for those searches, but they're probably very low.
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.
I suspect it's as likely as not that there wasn't ever a set agreement about "you can have X many search hits per month", and there may literally never have been a conversation about this until someone at [Other.Airline] called a meeting to ask why their partner search traffic had been multiplying massively month-over-month all year.
AC execs have said publicly, and repeatedly, that both calendar search and third-party tools have led to unhappy phone calls from their partner airlines, and that alone I don't find that terribly hard to believe. I don't find it terribly hard to believe that AC
feels they have been done measurable harm through the creation of friction with partners they consider valuable.
I
do have an awfully hard time connecting the dots from that to words like "illegal", but I'm not an IT lawyer. I do share the view that it seems like there could have been productive conversations about how to make this kind of tool manageable; AC has certainly shown willingness to partner with third parties in other areas, like delay compensation.
...but many of us have worked in jobs where one exec, or a boardroom full of people, decides that the only course of action is "our way or the highway", and it sounds like in this case, the relevant decision-makers chose not to engage with creators of third-party tools.
As I've said throughout this conversation, I skew towards Occam and Hanlon until direct evidence shows otherwise, and "nobody foresaw this problem, it blew up with the partners and now they're scrambling to patch it up" is a theory I have yet to see contradicted.