Mind you, we can still click the upgrade option box online. If the seats are there, the upgrade will show available.

Not as easy as seeing R bucket, but at least it is there.

It seems that EF and KVS weren't so 'innocent' and pulling from GDS. Maybe we should all offer them a big thanks for screen scraping the united servers to no end?

I think GDS is very costly, and they won't be able to get them for what they charge, so screen scraping was really the only way to get all the info. United instead of killing the functions for everyone, should have setup a deal with KVS and EF to charge them for their usage of the site, via a special URL they can track, and charge per query, hit, etc as they agree upon. It would less cost than GDS providers, but provide full info.
Those 'screen scrapes' aren't free either, and I know this first hand, the screen scraping scripts can RAPE a server when they go out of control or aggressive on the indexing.

frickin terrible...

This is a real shocker of a change among so many that have occurred since the CO takeover of UA. Yet another big to the merger and United on this one.

All this assumes that stated reason = actual reason.

After a short 13 months http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/conti...view-site.html RIP!

Just chiming in with the rest that EF now doesn't show R class either. And since I'm in the middle of a GPU-sponsored upgrade not showing up on the airport standby list tomorrow I'm totally hosed.

-RM

Count me among those who are 100% opposed to this 'customer hostile' action on the part of UA.

Shannon, I do hope you read through all these objections and bring the feedback to the responsible parties. Please make it clear that we would like the change rolled-back.

I would be fine with requiring a specific user-profile setting to enable the display, but we need to have the information available in the meantime.

LOL. Can't say I'm surprised. United either doesn't know what it is doing (I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and going with this option) or they purposely are making changes to eliminate high margin business and outright lying about why they are making these changes. I will give two examples which certainly don't prove what they are doing but do provide a trend:

1) They seriously devalued the PassPlus Secure program to the point where I haven't come across anyone who has renewed their contract since they made the changes. I'm sure that some have but its a low percentage. If they wanted to kill the program because they thought it was unprofitable they should have just killed the program. Instead they just slashed the program in many petty ways that are just irrational. Keep in mind that the customers who paid for this program are those who value full fare tickets and buy them.

2) By removing the ability to see JN and PN availability through this "expert mode" change United has in effect killed the YBM instant upgrade program. I don't have a problem with them killing that program. But please just kill that program. Don't be either stupid (which I think they are being) and not see what the effect of your actions are or be deceitful and throw out some nonsense about why you are making the change. Either way it doesn't paint United in a pretty light. If someone else has a third alternative whereby the airline is not chasing away people wanting to by F,A,J,C,D,P,Z,Y,B,M in order to prevent "confusion" by people buying the lowest possible fare buckets I'd love to hear it. Sounds like some serious paranoia by United if I'm wrong and they aren't just in over their heads and don't know what they are doing.

This change is unwelcome, but I'm gonna cut UA some slack here, for exactly the reason Steph3n stated.

Maybe UA Insider does not want to come out and say it, but if the reason they are killing this info is to deal with tools such as EF that were hitting the UA servers hard for this info and then re-selling it, I'd have a hard time blaming UA for saying "enough is enough". I also don't see an easy way around this. Requiring a user to solve a Captcha is one way to go, but thinking about it, there's no obvious, elegant way that I can see to integrate that into the site, and perhaps after a cost/benefit analysis, it just didn't seem worth it.

If this were really the problem and if they had semi-competent IT staff, it would be pretty easy to require users to be logged in to see this info and then flag accounts with excessive activity indicative of robotic behavior.

Great idea to punish the customer in this case. I guess this is UAs new operating model. There are many ways to prevent abuse; this is not one of them.

What a horrible change.

We need to make UA understand how it saves them that money they love so much to make this information publicly available.

I say as a community we choose a time during the day. Every single day we all call up inquiring about R space on a few flights. We do this at that same exact time every day until they realize its cheaper to just list the buckets on the site again.

That can theoretically be dozens possibly hundreds of agents that cannot be collecting change fees, upgrade fees, etc.

Oh man.... I detest this change. I am 6'6 and I use EF all the time. Heck, I am typing this message from a hotel room in BKK where I arrived one day earlier than needed because I could find a guaranteed upgrade R>0 compared to the same flight a day later.

I return to SFO via SEA because , again, I found guaranteed upgrade space. I detest playing the upgrade lottery and by taking away visibility UA is truly punishing their frequent flyers.

I would be okay if UA had something to replace EF's functionality. However this just seems the high school attitude of a company not being able to accept that other people are monetizing their data. That's okay but at least monetize it thru the UA site.

This really really sucks.

Now I gotta call the premier desk a hundred times a year in order to get the info.

Also , and not shooting the messenger, but to say this change is to protect inexperienced users is total and utter BS.

I am okay with companies making money and capitalizing on their core data but to lie here about the real reason is not okay.