Spent 55mins on the phone with the GS desk and Web Support looking up flight loads today. I expect there will be a lot more calls like that.

This is a horrible development, but not at all surprising from this company. :td:

Shannon, this is [bunk].

I just got the following from ExpertFlyer:

"Thank you for your email. 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."

This is not about the UA site, your non expert flyers, or screen scraping. You have shut off R so you can shut off upgrades.

Now Jeff, isn't it WAY past your bedtime? :rolleyes:

Truth is, all the complaints in the world will not register with United. They've already shown that to be the case. Until the thousands of FlyerTalkers truly upset about the changes at United STOP FLYING UNITED, and the bottom line is impacted, nothing will change. The ONLY thing that matters is current revenue streams, and until that starts to show the anger, Jeffy will continue to thumb his nose at all of you.

Dear Mr. Smisek, please restore upgrade availability on Expert Flyer!
 

Dear Mr. Smisek,

While I can understand, at the margin, the decision for not making fare buckets available on united.com, I cannot see the reasons why you decided to remove upgrade & award availability on expertflyer.com.

I understand from a post (here on FT) that you removed the fare buckets display from united.com in order to "eliminate confusion." Even if I were to understand your reasoning as relates to united.com, I would like to point out that the same reasoning cannot apply to expertflyer.com. People who subscribe to the expertflyer.com service are knowledgeable, sophisticated travelers. For these people, the risk that they will be "confused" is zero.

By removing this feature from expertflyer.com, you are now forcing your frequent flyers to spend hours on the phone with an agent searching for upgrade availability, something that can be done in a matter of minutes on expertflyer.com where one could search for up to one week at a time.

This will put an unrealistic strain on your call center agents, and could push some of your customers to fly another airline where upgrade searches are more transparent. Not to mention that the opportunity cost of time is quite high for many of us.

Some have argued that the real reason why you are removing the upgrade/award information for expertflyer.com is that you wish to make it more difficult for people to use their miles. I doubt that this is the case. But many are skeptical.

This said, there is one simple gesture you can make to show that your decision was not intended to hinder our ability to use FF miles:

Restore availability on expertflyer.com. And do it now.

I have been one of your strongest supporters on this board throughout the very volatile times related to this merger. I continue to be a supporter, but the latest decision is putting my faith to test.

I would, therefore, respectfully ask that you reconsider your decision.

Warmest regards.

Did United actually pull it from EF, or did EF just scrape the united.com web site?

It's bad enough that UA has hurt many of its best customers by doing this but, unfortunately, they have also caused real financial pain to a useful and creative small business (EF).

With more than 1,350 award travel destinations served by United, United Express and the Star Alliance® network, you can really take off with MileagePlus®. And now that we're ranked #1 in award seat availability among U.S. global carriers, it's an excellent time to use your miles for award travel. Book your award today.

Now how are we supposed to find award and upgrade space? :o

I've believed for some time that the more the "over-entitled" complain, the more UA's current management believe they're on the right track. @:-)

Like a politician running for reelection the only thing UA will respond to is money. If you want to get their attention, vote with your wallet. When they see the impact on their bottom line then things *might* change.

If you gave me your entire P.R. Budget for the year 2012, I don't think I could have used it to piss off loyal, elite, frequent customers as much as you did with this move.

Why has fare bucket info been removed from "View My Reservation" page???
 

I'm at a loss as to the purpose of removing info from here...

Obviously, data scrapers aren't going to be willing to confirm tickets just to get the data, and once the ticket is done, there is very little scope for passenger confusion.

Yesterday, inventory went to R3 on a flight I am waitlisted on. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. If I hadn't been able to see that R availability, it would be impossible to know.

Because UA's goal wasn't to keep this information available for experts. It was to make the whole process more opaque. There is simply no other explanation. JeffCo has declared war on the frequent flyer, plain and simple. :mad:


You are fare more generous to them than I am. They BOTH don't know what they are doing AND are purposely making these devaluing changes.


No, it's still there--but now, much like the W upgrade lottery for GPUs, UA is asking you to play a lottery. "Buy the Instant Upgrade fare and hope you get an upgrade."


Shannon, I hate to call "shennanagins" here (FT won't let me use the actual, more accurate term :mad:), but that's exactly what this is. It would be extremely simple to add a flag to each UA MP profile that says "expert mode," and then in the UI layer on .bomb, look at that flag to determine whether to show or not that information.

High school hackers could make a change like that, even to a site as large as .bomb. It doesn't require changes to the antiquated core SHARES code.

If "confusion" was truly an issue, that would have been the path to go.

If "confusion" was truly an issue, why is the solution to hammer everyone who isn't confused and to take away their needed functionality? You have to admit with all the issues we've experienced (and which many people have reported here) with inventory-related problems that we NEED THIS FUNCTIONALITY.

It goes well beyond upgrades. Suppose I want to see if I can standby, or do a Same-day Change, and judge which flights might be possible options. Now, you're saying I have to wait until I could actually stand by or actually make the SDC, whereas before I could at least get an idea of loads farther in advance--deciding, for example, if it would be worthwhile to get up and go to the airport early in the morning or not.

This is going to make my life as a frequent flyer much harder. And that's apparently just that the heck JeffCo wants: make your most frequent and best customers' lives harder?!?!?! What kind of screwed-up world does United live in? :mad: :td:


"Seen" as a takeaway? HEY, IT IS A TAKEAWAY. When you have an issue you want to fix, you don't break things for everyone else and promise them some nebulous possible "fix" in the future which "might" give them back some of their functionality.

Yeah, Shannon's "spin" on it was that "confusion" was leading to higher call volumes... so what do they do? Something to drive MORE people to call and make lengthier calls! :mad:

I'm tempted to start doing daily calls to review inventory on every single one of my flights.

What do you give as the over/under on days (or hours) before UA call center agents are told they cannot give that information out any longer?

boooo... lame..
it's called expert mode.. if you dont understand the fare classes, dont use expert mode.

horrible and disapoointing move ua........

What about it? It affects the government, not private companies.

Sure, but why would they? More to the point, the carrier already publishes fare info in a variety of ways. This move is limiting access to some inventory data but not fare data.

Actually, yes. It is much easier to just not display the info then to alter the profiles, add the management of those settings and add the code to show it or not. I'm not saying that the profile stuff is difficult - it isn't - but just commenting out the code to display the fare class line is way easier. It also requires much less testing.
It won't be available on either one. They were both just scraping it from the United site.

United was never "providing" the data to EF. EF was taking it off the main page. I think that much is clear based on the data suddenly disappearing when this announcement was made.
Circumstances suggest the latter.