glennaa11

is there any way to limit searches to business/first only? I select business/first option but then the results show me lots of economy only itineraries in addition to the odd business class option once in a while. I presume there is no way to limit to business only?

dlflyer00

On the homepage, you can sort by the business or first columns; I'm not sure where you'd see economy only itineraries. The search tool also has this as a Pro feature (can filter for 1 seat in first, 2 direct seats in business, etc).

peterrudy

Thank you for creating such an amazing award space search engine.

P

bbbird

great job.
So important and time-saving.
Thanks

Ruber74

Is there a reason that LifeMiles was removed from the tool?

Andy76

yes, Lifemiles is more down than operating so they took it down. Use United

golive

Is the website now being redirected to seats. aero? When I click on the link provided, I am redirected to seats.aero.

scubadu

Yes. It was never intended to be a "fun little tool to help the community" It was developed to become a business, and now it is.

Regards

golive

thanks for clarifying, and it's not a problem at all. I have the PRO version Now I have to figure out why I don't find any availability on TP flights from LIS to Brazil (FOR, GRU, GIG, CNF).

view-with-a-room

Per https://seats.aero/lifemiles

"Due to LifeMiles system issues, we are currently unable to update LifeMiles availability reliably. You can find Star Alliance availability via our support for United MileagePlus and Air Canada Aeroplan. "

The tool isn't useless for Lifemiles, but availability on United and Aeroplan isn't the same as availability on LifeMiles. Not clear how valuable the tool is for United or Aeroplan. The United award search tool is easy to use. The Aeroplan award search tool is different...

scubadu

No problem at all and I was just being a bit sarcastic as it seems increasingly common for tool developers to join FT and imply they are creating a tool for their own usage that they just want to share with "the community." But what they are really doing is market research to create business.

And now, the developer of the "Lifemiles availability finder" is getting a painful lesson in exactly what it means to be a "business."

Regards

dlflyer00

It did indeed become a business, but I built this site while I was happily employed, and ran it for a while without any sort of option to pay at all. However, around 6 months or so after I started it, it became quite expensive to run on its own, so I added an optional paid tier to ensure it could keep running.

I am fortunate that it’s now my full-time job to work on Seats.aero, but we still have no employees aside from my wife, who does customer support.

There’s a lot of reasons we had to remove LifeMiles, including instability of their system and hostility towards us. We might eventually convert other *A availability into LM availability based on what we know about their award chart and routing rules, but it’s a bit weird to do it. We could eventually bring LM support back, but I just don’t see the value given the lack of unique availability.

SingaporeDon

dlflyer, appreciate your explanation and contribution to the community and the need to commercialize your efforts at some stage rather than keep on running it as a free community support. Couple of quick questions
1. I guess legal challenges will by airlines will also mean you incurring legal fees which you will have to find. Where do you stand on that front? Which airlines have sent you legal notices to stop scrapping their databases, and are you trying to negotiate a compromise with them?
2. Other than life Miles issues, are all the other airline award search tools working and providing "correct" answers?

Thanks

dlflyer00

Air Canada is the only airline or mileage program sending lawyers after us. Lawyers are certainly expensive but we have the resources to defend ourselves and will definitely continue to do so. We’ve always offered to work with any airline or mileage program on any problems, but Air Canada ignored this offer and sued us.

No other issues that I am aware of! We have a transparent status page at https://seats.aero/status which updates in real-time for any outages.