AA web and mobile app only show flights from the past two years?
Apr 15, 2020, 4:01 am
#1
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2010
Programs: DL, OZ, AC, AS, AA, BA, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, IHG
Posts: 19,896
AA web and mobile app only show flights from the past two years?
I haven't flown AA in a while. I think the last time I flew with them was in 2017. I was just going through my account today and I noticed that I can't see any of my past flight activities. Only the two years are displayed? What happened to my flight history? Deleted from AA's servers?
Apr 15, 2020, 8:50 am
#2
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Bye Delta
Programs: AA EXP, HH Diamond, IHG Plat, Hyatt Plat, Marriott Plat, Nat'l Exec Elite, Avis Presidents Club
Posts: 16,273
Archived. You won’t be able to access older data online, but you can be sure AA still keeps it around for their own internal purposes. No different than your bank, really.
Apr 15, 2020, 3:09 pm
#3
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2010
Programs: DL, OZ, AC, AS, AA, BA, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, IHG
Posts: 19,896
Apr 15, 2020, 3:41 pm
#4
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Madison WI
Programs: AA Lifetime PLT - 2.9MM, Lifetime AC, HHonors Gold, Marriott Gold, IHG Plat Amb, Hertz Precs Crcl
Posts: 2,213
You can try calling AAdvantage Customer Service (NOT reservations), but I'm not sure they'll be to able to give you a "full dump." They were most helpful to me when I wanted to know my status dates over the years. They were happy to go back to when I joined, first hit Gold, first hit Platinum, first Exp, MM dates and renewal dates. But still, only 20 dates or so - not flights, dates, cities, class etc.
Apr 15, 2020, 3:53 pm
#5
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2010
Programs: DL, OZ, AC, AS, AA, BA, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, IHG
Posts: 19,896
You can try calling AAdvantage Customer Service (NOT reservations), but I'm not sure they'll be to able to give you a "full dump." They were most helpful to me when I wanted to know my status dates over the years. They were happy to go back to when I joined, first hit Gold, first hit Platinum, first Exp, MM dates and renewal dates. But still, only 20 dates or so - not flights, dates, cities, class etc.
Apr 16, 2020, 12:06 am
#6
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Bye Delta
Programs: AA EXP, HH Diamond, IHG Plat, Hyatt Plat, Marriott Plat, Nat'l Exec Elite, Avis Presidents Club
Posts: 16,273
It becomes quite expensive to keep all that online and also there are performance challenges as the size of the data grows. For example, when you log into your account and pull up your account history, it has to go and query all those hundreds of millions of records to find the activity that belongs to your account. And you expect that to occur quickly. The bigger the data set, the longer it takes to store or retrieve records. Most customers have no actual need (beyond idle curiosity) to go back more than two years in their account history. Why slow down everyone's access to recent data because a few people want to see 10-20 year old data? Also, the bigger the data set, the more resources are required to process, store, and retrieve it, which gets quite expensive when performance requirements are high. This is why companies with massive data sets often maintain high performance primary storage for recent data that is accessed frequently, and cold storage for older data that is rarely accessed but may need to be kept around for business or compliance reasons... it is acceptable to businesses that retrieval times for data in cold storage can be significantly slower, which allows for lower infrastructure complexity and reduced spend. So long story short, it's a technical best practice to ensure that frequently accessed data remains readily available, while also reducing the costs of storing older data long-term.
I've never asked AA for a full account history. I've gotten a full summary from Starwood back in the day when my account balances weren't adding up. It took them a few days to process the request and they emailed me a file. You can be sure AA maintains the data internally, but whether they are willing to produce it for you is another matter.
Last edited by javabytes; Apr 16, 2020 at 12:13 am
Apr 16, 2020, 1:34 am
#7
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2010
Programs: DL, OZ, AC, AS, AA, BA, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, IHG
Posts: 19,896
Technical reasons. The databases are massive. AA transports over 200 million passengers a year, and has to store many data points about each of those enplanements. For comparison, take a look at Microsoft Excel - a spreadsheet is kind of like a simple database. It can only go up to 1 million rows of data, and if you've ever tried to open a large file, it probably brought your computer to its knees with far less than 1 million rows actually populated with data. It's a bit of an oversimplication, because a spreadsheet is not a database, but that can still give you an idea of the magnitude of the challenge enterprise data architects are up against.
It becomes quite expensive to keep all that online and also there are performance challenges as the size of the data grows. For example, when you log into your account and pull up your account history, it has to go and query all those hundreds of millions of records to find the activity that belongs to your account. And you expect that to occur quickly. The bigger the data set, the longer it takes to store or retrieve records. Most customers have no actual need (beyond idle curiosity) to go back more than two years in their account history. Why slow down everyone's access to recent data because a few people want to see 10-20 year old data? Also, the bigger the data set, the more resources are required to process, store, and retrieve it, which gets quite expensive when performance requirements are high. This is why companies with massive data sets often maintain high performance primary storage for recent data that is accessed frequently, and cold storage for older data that is rarely accessed but may need to be kept around for business or compliance reasons... it is acceptable to businesses that retrieval times for data in cold storage can be significantly slower, which allows for lower infrastructure complexity and reduced spend. So long story short, it's a technical best practice to ensure that frequently accessed data remains readily available, while also reducing the costs of storing older data long-term.
I've never asked AA for a full account history. I've gotten a full summary from Starwood back in the day when my account balances weren't adding up. It took them a few days to process the request and they emailed me a file. You can be sure AA maintains the data internally, but whether they are willing to produce it for you is another matter.
It becomes quite expensive to keep all that online and also there are performance challenges as the size of the data grows. For example, when you log into your account and pull up your account history, it has to go and query all those hundreds of millions of records to find the activity that belongs to your account. And you expect that to occur quickly. The bigger the data set, the longer it takes to store or retrieve records. Most customers have no actual need (beyond idle curiosity) to go back more than two years in their account history. Why slow down everyone's access to recent data because a few people want to see 10-20 year old data? Also, the bigger the data set, the more resources are required to process, store, and retrieve it, which gets quite expensive when performance requirements are high. This is why companies with massive data sets often maintain high performance primary storage for recent data that is accessed frequently, and cold storage for older data that is rarely accessed but may need to be kept around for business or compliance reasons... it is acceptable to businesses that retrieval times for data in cold storage can be significantly slower, which allows for lower infrastructure complexity and reduced spend. So long story short, it's a technical best practice to ensure that frequently accessed data remains readily available, while also reducing the costs of storing older data long-term.
I've never asked AA for a full account history. I've gotten a full summary from Starwood back in the day when my account balances weren't adding up. It took them a few days to process the request and they emailed me a file. You can be sure AA maintains the data internally, but whether they are willing to produce it for you is another matter.
Apr 16, 2020, 2:37 am
#9
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Pittsburgh
Programs: MR/SPG LT Titanium, AA LT PLT, UA SLV, Avis PreferredPlus
Posts: 31,007
Last edited by CPRich; Apr 16, 2020 at 2:54 am
Apr 16, 2020, 2:44 am
#10
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Pittsburgh
Programs: MR/SPG LT Titanium, AA LT PLT, UA SLV, Avis PreferredPlus
Posts: 31,007
fwiw, AA records 1,000,000 passenger-flight records in about two days. And the data likely isn't stored in a single table.
Last edited by CPRich; Apr 16, 2020 at 2:56 am