From what I understand, they have not really cut it off. I assume they are more than happy for every booking made through the service, but (like virtually every other consumer tool) it now is a oneway street. They just prevent customers from reading their internal remarks.

If I can't even see my travel itinerary, with or without comments, they have restricted access significantly.

Absolutely true. I have never used the service (luckily, I have access to professional Sabre) and I thought that reports of not being able to see one's own itinerary were isolated occurences. If it is meant to be and stays this way AA have rendered the service completely useless, I agree. In that case, I really feel sorry for the guys running the service!

Just to clarify this, we are not a "travel service" in that we do not do "bookings", take reservations nor sell tickets. We provide information of various types related to airline travel for virtually all airlines in a concise way. PNR access, while very important to many, is only one facet of the service we offer. Most of our subscribers routinely use and continue to find value in all the other aspects of the service more than PNR access.

But only hours to cut off access to a worthwhile product...
 

Well said!

In the brief time I could see some of my PNRs, it became apparent that a future flight where I (EXP) had tried to do a companion upgrade request for my non-status spouse had failed. AA.com seemed to have accepted my request, but then all visibility disappeared using their "My Reservations" option.

A phone call cleared it up - and I could verify it after the fact using ExpertFlyer - but I would never have known. I'm happy to use web interfaces for most of my interaction with AA (or our corporate TA), but it certainly does seem to be an uphill struggle to get decent access. And, back to the OP's right-on point - they worked this issue in a hurry.

Geez...

Wow, this totally sucks.

Nice going, AA. You can't possibly have thought ExpertFlyer subscribers are the same people who would subscribe directly to Sabre or whatever to get this information? Gimme a break. ExpertFlyer was not competition.

I would love to see the idiot at AA who made the decision to close off this service to post here publicly the reason for it (including addressing the point in the previous paragraph). We're all (or at least most of us!) mature, intelligent adults, and I'm sure we would be able to understand a logical, even business-motivated explanation. Sadly, I have a feeling there isn't much of one.

The only thing that I think could justify this is if ExpertFlyer was violating the Terms of Service of the GDSes they were using. Other than that, it sounds like a jerk at AA just wanting to keep the PNR comment information out of the hands of the consumers for philosophical reasons.

[Quote removed for moderation consistency]

I'll let JonNYC and "Mr. Voice" (Ms?) defend themeselves. But if you had cared to look at their web site you would have found:

"We are a privately held corporation registered in the State of New York. We have contracted directly with two GDS services to access airline information."

Not exactly a "scam" and access "without a contract" as you so eloquently state.

.... and welcome to FlyerTalk!

While I think that the PNR feature of EF was useful, the behavior you noted above has been around for a long time, and much reported, Itn information routinely disappears while upgrades are being processed. In the end, you still made a call to get things confirmed, the same as you would have done without EF. You went in pre-aware that the request had been accepted, only to have that confirmed- same as would have happened without EF PNR access.

So, IMO, there was not a lot gained, in this instance, from seeing the PNR info.

Cheers.

I don't think AA was unreasonable
 

Wile I'm not going to go as far as some to say that this was some kind of scam, and we are further bankrputing the airlines, I was failry sure that this would happen. While access to a PNR is nice, I don't think AA should be faulted for not allowing access to their internal comments ("passenger seemed to want to ramble on about..."). That is their internal information. We may not like that we can't see it, but we should not really have access.

Imagine, in your own work, if your customers got the minutes of all the internal meetings you have about theit business ("well, this is not the best solution for them, but it's what we have, so let's try to sell it").

To say that AA "cut off a useful benefit in a few hours" and is in any misdirected is, IMO, not fair. This is a move toward undesired access to their provate data. I sure hope they'd move this quickly if some organization got access to my credit card information (no, I'm not comparing EF to that- it's completely legit, but it's still internal information).

Ok, off soapbox now :).

Cheers.

I fully appreciate any company has its rights to protect their internal use only info. But PNR data cannot be classified as internal use as its data may be shared with other carriers the pax may be flying with or even third parties with access to Sabre and the likes.

Now, being a PNR an open document, it's the carrier responsibility to make its employees understand that and not allowing them to write info there that may become public knowledge.

As you know, if you want to have access to the comments that someone may have written in your AAdvantage accounts you simply need to change your address to Europe and there companies have to share their data with their customers if they ask so.

So I guess this was move either because EF was not allowed to the first place or some very narrow mindeds inside AA. I do believe to be the second case. Time will tell.

When corporations try to hide data... that's already valuable info.

Excellent point. Perhaps the basic PNR info should be in one place- publicly available, and the comments should be stored elsewhere and not shared. I do agree that basic PNR info should be accessible as it has been shown in this thread to be very helpful.

Cheers.

Well said, IMO!

I found that of seven PNRs I reviewed, significant misinformation was included in two of them, which I was able to correct, as well as a spelling error of my last name - these days, can cause severe travel disruption by a petty "security" minion. NO other access would have allowed me to know this, and if the errors had been allowed to stand, I might have had my travel plans interrupted or otherwise interfered with.

Mind you , I also tend to wonder why there was a near-43% error rate in bookings I've made! I know this isn't a statistically random sample, etc. but... I can think of a number of businesses where this would be an intolerably high error rate, and can now see more clearly why we are frequently posting about problems at the gate, inability to check in online, in-trip flight cancellations, etc. etc.

Perhaps AA should actually give us a partial rebate on EF fees for helping with the editing of our travel PNR records! :D OK, that's over the top... but I am certainly left wondering why so many glitches? Perhaps they are using EDS as their model... :p

Sabre PNR data..
 

Sabre PNR's do actually remain the property of the carrier whose partition they are booked in, i.e. - American Airlines, in this instance.

Yes, data is shared with other carriers and ground service vendors, however, this data is actually structured data held within various data fields within the PNR. For example, if a PNR is booked in Sabre but includes BA segments, a BA agent won’t see all the 'Remarks' field data in the Sabre PNR. When the corresponding PNR is retrieved in Amadeus, the Sabre remarks data isn't visible.

In addition, airlines and travel agencies on Sabre can employ Sabre Global Security, to inhibit viewing of certain parts of their PNR's. Perhaps if expertflyer.com had used this feature of Sabre, their AA access would not have been revoked.

Finally, I'm pretty sure there's something in the Sabre agency contracts covering dissemination/distribution of data to external sources, so they may also have violated their Sabre contract. Can't say for sure though of course, without seeing the Schedule A and entire contract....

777Brit, Sounds like there possibly may have been an, er, interface breakdown between Sabre and the GDS that EF uses for its data stream, as well.

We'll see how it all settles out. In the meantime, it has taken considerably less time to find award seats, availability for specific fares I am searching for, etc. using EF, so I'm not unhappy with what I do get. (I have found award seats between US and Australia on QF and on to Mexico on MEX, and have found scarce I class seats for ourselves - savings of thousands of dollars, and / or considerable time searching with alternative systems.)

Difficulties gifting eVIPs
 

Wow! Doesn't this constitute a pretty major change from the transferrability policy written on the old VIP03 (and previous) certs? I had enjoyed giving these certs to friends when I had more than I could use. But if I give an upgrade, only for the passenger to fail to receive the upgrade at check-in because I'm not there.... Wow, that would be quite a shock, both for me and for whatever friend I had given (purported to give) the upgrade.

Anyone have any personal experiences with this?