Just did the same. It's a shame since EFlyer is a great service. They must be pulling over time today working on cancellations. The funny thing is that the other program that I have tons of time & money invested in has one of the worst FF programs there is (Emirates) but I have never cared since that's not why I fly them. (as opposed to UA which I fly ONLY cuz of MP) But even they have more transparency then UA when it comes to upgrades & awards

I just want to add my to this idea. I use(d) this feature a lot, and do not understand why it is being completely removed.

September 8, 2013

Hello, anybody here?

So if R inventory can still be determined by checking 'show upgrade availability' and then looking at the results of the search, I can only imagine that EF has their expert hackers working round the clock this weekend preparing a new screen scrape. And if UA thought the last one was hard on their servers.....

this one is literally going to POUND THE [heck] OUT OF THEM.

Face it UA, your IT is not exactly world class. The best programmers work for startups where they can make a real difference in this world. The more you piss these guys off, the bigger the bullseye on your back becomes.

EF knows there is a market for this information. Many of us subscribe to their service for one reason -- to access United fare / upgrade availability. If you think you want to protect your revenue stream, trust me, they do too. And it's a much larger component of their livelihood.

You have been warned.

No evidence of being able to choose the "expert mode" at all when logging into your account. Terrible move for transparency sake. This change should only have occurred when the "expert mode" change was ready for implementation....a major step back for United. Fare classes aren't showing up on KVS Tool either

Sort of +1.

I'm under the impression that KVS does take from UA's screen (which was not intended) whereas expertflyer cut a deal with UA and got permission to display the info.

Do you not understand that she is making a sort of oblique reference to KVS-like tools when she talks about screen scraping? I cannot say KVS is responsible for the change, but it certainly seems like they were one of the factors in the decision. The blame is with UA, but KVS didn't help at all.

I hear some people talking about being able to still see fare availability on reservations you are holding. I cannot. Is there a secret to this? Maybe only on the preview site?

The AA status match seems more and more appealing ...

I cannot that UA would be so stupid to do this - oh wait a minute, yes I can. This has just made me have to rethink my whole booking process. I think I will just call, and keep calling the IK line, when I want to know fare bucket availabilty. Hopefully this stupid move will overwhelm their call in reservations system.

Stupid is what stupid does.

United sends the info to EF. They can restore that. How do I know? EF collects upgrades/award info for AA and that info is not available on aa.com. Same for many other airlines.

I also don't think EF just scraped seeing as how they generally returned different flights (& more flights) than .bomb when doing various searches for particular inventory buckets, and occasionally showed different results for R than did .bomb.

Has anyone who is/with a corporate/full-service travel agency with native GDS/CRS access confirmed that availability is extent/gone from that source as well? My recollection (prior to booking awards on the internet) is that a travel agent could make award bookings so they'd have to be able to see information and book into available inventory. Mine did this a number of times back in the 90's. Corrections/clarifications are appreciated.

I mention this because of the discussion in this thread and the travel tools forum about EF scraping UA data versus having CRS/GDS access.

Perhaps marginally off topic (though given the current state, not really). I've only used EF with United. Is there significant reason to keep my subscription if I change carriers? My two most likely to convert to are delta and aa.

make sure you let them know that you don't appreciate their claims of being on GDS when really scraping a website too.

i cannot see fare bucket info on reservations that have been booked already. i don't have anything on hold so cannot say for sure but my guess is that it's all disabled.