I'm going to guess that it will disappear from EF, but I would be extremely happy to be corrected... :(

another terrible move by CO management :td:

My bet would be otherwise...their release talks about people "confused" by the codes and such things, and the true reason is probably website back-end changes. So it's probably going to stay on EF, since EF does its own customer support.

Overall a step in the wrong direction, though!

EF gets its data from a GDS, not from screen-scraping the UA website. So unless UA is simultaneously blocking inventory from travel agency reservation systems, my guess is EF will continue to have access to and display this data.

Today United Airlines has decided to remove award and upgrade class inventory from various channels, affecting ExpertFlyer. As such, United will be removed from the list of airlines in the Award & Upgrade search tool until further notice. In addition, all Active Flight Alerts for United award or upgrade class codes will be put into the Expired state. Should the award and upgrade data become available at a later date, we will again activate those Flight Alerts.

However, all other United data will still be available on ExpertFlyer including:

• Detailed regular fare class inventory via the Flight Availability search tool
• Flight Alerts for regular fare inventory classes
• Live Seat Maps and Seat Alerts
• Fare Information searches and all related fare data
• Flight Status, Flight Detail, Travel Information, and all other ExpertFlyer search tools.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter and continued support of ExpertFlyer.com

-The ExpertFlyer.com Team

<redacted>

I agree this hurts EF and users but I still find value in EF especially the alert system that has saved my bacon many times

<redacted> Airlines are withholding information they regard as proprietary or / and not allowing a number of sites from linking to show various data including miles accounts, etc. so it is not surprising the data shown by various aggregation sites are being affected.

Posts making unsupported claims or seeming to be attacks will continue to be summarily deleted.

Thanks,

JDiver, Senior Moderator

Bummer!
 

Thanks for the Info ExpertFlyer Voice. Obviously, this is no fault of EF, but this pinches all the same. I'm a loyal subscriber and will remain so as long as EF continues to show AA inventory, but I used EF to search for award travel on UA also.....so, this is a bummer....

Your website is fantastic, but I only ever used it to look for UA upgrade inventory. Now that that's no longer possible, are you offering pro-rated refunds for people who wish to cancel service? Or perhaps put accounts like mine on hiatus until (hopefully) this information ever comes back, in which case I'm more than happy to continue as a subscriber for years to come?

Sad I was wrong. :(

We are actually looking at a way of restoring basic upgrade search/alerting functionality. If that doesn't bear fruit then you can email us but give us time to implement a solution so you can continue to use ExpertFlyer.

Thanks for your responsiveness -- I'm definitely willing to give it some time to get back what UA took away. Fingers crossed!

Me too. I recently just purchased another monthly subscription, primarily to check for UA award space for upcoming flights. I know it's absolutely no fault of expertflyer, but it isn't pan out, it won't be particularly useful for my needs.

Royal bummer on UA on this decision. :td:

Thanks for the information.

It looks like KVS is still going to be showing reward and upgrade availability, albeit in a Boolean format.

Odd that EF seems to be taking a divergent path on this...

That's because KVS is screen-scraping their information. The tool can still screen-scrape to see if the UA site will let someone upgrade (in which case, an upgrade is available, and KVS can say there is upgrade space). EF, on the other hand, pays for their data through official sources (GDSes), which apparently United is completely blacking inventory out from, so EF has no way of knowing anything about upgrade space.

There are a lot of accusations on the UA board stating that EF was also screen-scraping award and upgrade info from UA's website - as opposed to receiving this info via GDS as is done with revenue buckets. And that's why EF also lost this capability when UA ended Expert Mode.

As an EF subscriber, I couldn't care less how they get the info, but if EF was not screen-scraping, maybe it should make that clear, as its silence is being taken as an admission of scraping.