Raffles

John Lewis is the UK's largest department store chain, they also own Waitrose which is the poshest supermarket chain (think Whole Foods but cheaper but better food!). But sadly I meant to say 30k gets you Ł30 of vouchers!!

Not in the UK and I presume many countries outside the US

If you already have 5k PC, you can buy 10k for just $60 using the 'cash and points and cancel' method, which is cheaper than SPG

susiesan

Since I was planning on transferring in 120K MR points and enough SPG points in September to achieve the amount needed for 2 biz tix to China in 2011, should I just transfer 1K MR points now to get something into the account? Will that be enough to give me access to the search tool?

BTW, I just tried to log in and use the search and got the message about needing to have points i nthe account. : (

Oxon Flyer

Don't tell Debenhams that.......

littlevoices

Disaster, but, potentially not. Whilst it means I'm going to waste one stay/flight credit it may help to recduce the number of people able to search for reward seats... increasing their availability (selfish view). Personally will look at a retro-hertz credit that was going to go to Marriott when I could be bothered doing it, 500 Marriott points aren't worth much anyway.

(I'd pay ExpertFlyer more frequently, I currently pay my $5 on an ad-hoc basis, if only they offered a *A search.. perhaps it will help build a business case for them)

Out of interest, what was the *A search engine that is being mentioned?

KVS

KVS Tool is not affected by the latest changes to the ANA website and continues to provide access to award/upgrade availability across all Star Alliance member carriers: http://Help.KVSTool.com/#Classes

littlevoices

Thanks for your reply, makes me kind of curious: If your tool is still working have I mis-interpreted it in the past. From the screenshots, with the staralliance award searcher mentioning your ANA number/PIN I assumed it was screen scraping ANA's website to display availability on flights (in some manner). Are you actually using an alternative mechanism that won't be affected by these changes?

Perhaps in the background Expertflyer is doing the same but it was always hidden and I assumed they paid someone cash to get direct access to the actual airline system that shows the award classes (perhaps they scrape too?), hence the more limited number of airlines available but no requirement to have an ANA account.

710 77345

Which company / tool should we be boycotting & bad-mouthing as a result of this?

rankourabu

We shouldnt, since we dont know for sure.
But there has been a beta tool under development by a FlyerTalker (I think I saw the post in the United forum), that basically uses the ANA database/interface, but makes it much more user friendly.

sbm12

It is still scraping the site but the URL request used gets around the fact that they are not exposing the link to users through the main UI. In other words, while they aren't showing the old link to you it still works.

I've built a GreaseMonkey script to generate the same link for the common man.

Install this little ditty: http://old.wanderingaramean.com/staralink.user.js

Then go here: https://www.ana.co.jp/asw/AMCTopServlet?type=e

Click on the Award Reservation link on the menu there and then look in the top left corner. You should see a link that says "Click for *A Search" that should take you to the *A search form. You might get an error about session expired. If you do just click on the link/button to the home page and go to ANA Mileage Club again and to Award Reservations again. It usually works but occasionally gets that session timeout issue.

Any feedback you have is welcome.

jarino

The screenshots from the tool which are available could indicate that in the background only a few (one?) accounts are used, maybe even with requests from one IP address only as intermediary (speculation). In addition due to the wide date and route range offered by the tool, the number of requests must be enormous. This type of scraping should be very obvious to ANA.

Smarter Tools require every user to use his/her own account number/password and requests are processed through the user's IP address which is different for every user. Most likely ANA does not even notice this kind of use.

baggageinhall

Thanks but I do not (and will not) run Windows.

GoldCircle

Doh! I did one yesterday...

hauteboy

I noticed this 'enhancement' last night.
Do any of the *A sites show TAM awards yet?

RAPC

ANA is your best bet still, jiust use one of the fixes detailed in this thread.

Guy Betsy

When I had accidentally credited an Avis Car rental to ANA Mileage Club in Apr 2008, I thought that was dumb of me to do so. I thought , hey, here I am with only 300 miles to my account and everyone else on FT is doing this for free.

I guess it was the smart thing for me to do then !