So Shannon, where is /what is the "one new feature"?

I suggest that Flyertalk members send an email to Martin Hand SVP United Customer Experience and inform him that United's elite flyers are very upset at the loss of the availability to display upgrade information and fare class availability. The email address is [email protected]

You're missing the point. The question isn't if they screen scraped, the question is if they were allowed to. Of the 2 parties that would know that, you are not one of them.

Also, we know that EF does in fact pay for GDS data for at least some of what they do. Not only have they said so many times over the years but it is evidenced by the data they have that isn't available on an airline website.

Are you serious?!?! This was the only transperancy we had for our waitlisted upgrade requests. Well after reading some posts, maybe this wasn't the only way, but the easiest. I fail to understand why they completely removed it with the idea that it confused people, I bet most people didn't even know it was there.

What another bonehead move by UA.

If the info isn't in the GDS, and they are scraping to get it......and it is rather obvious if they were 'allowed to' it is right here, and the fact they werent aware beforehand it was going to be 'removed' and impact their commercial products:
http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/legal.aspx

"This Web site is for the User's personal, noncommercial use only. User agrees not to modify, copy, alter, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from this Web site without United Airlines' prior written permission. User agrees not to use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy this Web site or the content contained therein or for any other unauthorized purpose without United Airlines' prior written permission. User agrees not to use any device, software or routine to interfere with or attempt to interfere with the proper working of this Web site or any activities conducted on this site. User agrees not to take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure. United Airlines reserves the right to investigate any illegal and/or unauthorized use of this Web site, including, but not limited to, unauthorized framing of this Web site or unauthorized use of any robot, spider or other automated device, and to take appropriate legal action, including, without limitation, civil, criminal and injunctive redress."




BTW, united.com is going very fast today, maybe they got rid of all the scrapers....or maybe they just got rid of all the customers!

I'd go further and suggest they send written letters via snail mail, too, which tend to carry much more weight than an e-mail that can be fired off in 30 seconds.

Dear Shannon,

With all due respect...my impression is that your employers are sitting around a table, trying to come up with ways to irritate your most loyal and frequent customers. This is yet another example of this.

If the problem they are trying to solve it truly "confusion" among travelers, then why not automatically reset everyone's search mode to basic, and then allow those of us who actually use the system to intelligently book our reservations based upon your inventory to go back in and change the mode back to "expert." This way, we would easily have it during the booking process, without having to waste our time with dummy award bookings or spending UA's time and money by calling an agent. Your "confused" customers would be relieved of this problem of being shown too much data.

KH

Third time posting this! People seem to overlook it still exists!

Not for me - I have a nice, fast connection, and UAL.com still takes 15-20 seconds to pull up any live reservation, slow as usual.

I really believe this is yet another sign that their IT (at the very least how it is reflected in the web site) is in horrible shape. I don't feel it's a conspiracy, but frankly feel it is ineptitude compared to what I was used to with pre-merger United. This is not meant as CO bashing per-se, as I know it's gotten worse for CO flyers compared to what they were used to...just in different ways. But it is definitely IT department bashing.

I have had 3 instances in the last month where data about flights has been widely conflicting....

1. Attempt to change a flight YUL->ORD last week online. Minimal charge for the change was $225 (+$150 change fee). However, expert mode showed availability in my booked class, so it should have been no charge. Called in and they were able to easily book me at no extra charge and just the change fees.

2. Attempt to book a flight online LAX->ORD->LAX. Priced at $995RT. I did not select a ticket, but opened up another browser, entered same info and got a RT price of $785. Redid search on original browser once -- $995. Searched again -- $785. Expert mode showed a minimum of 4 seats in each fare class that had tickets (checked in yet another browser). Tried again in two hours and had similar results. What would cause this? I wasn't logged in on either browswer.

3. Booked flight ORD->LAX and used a CPU, since expert mode showed availability. Upon booking, wasn't upgraded but put on wait list. Called and was easily upgraded -- agent was surprised I wasn't upgraded automatically.

So basically, I'm calling all the time now to double check things.

On top of this, my upgrade percentage has gone from 95% to 0% since June, flying the same routes (and flights) between ORD and LAX. Something definitely changed during that time period to cause my priority to drop for some reason...or the rules changed. Up until that time I hadn't experienced much of a change from last year. But man...it's really different now.

Anyway-- I'm sure that agents have been getting questioned regarding what we see on the site in expert mode. pmCO agents probably aren't used to it -- and pmUA are. But on top of this, if the information being shown to us is incorrect or incomplete (like I think it is)...that would be a reason to remove it for now until it's fixed.

Just a hypothesis, but my gut is that the info that is being displayed for us is wrong...and that's what's really causing the problem. I've certainly seen it on my end...

Ok, what was the primary intent then?

Hm, in addition to making self-service investigation of irrops reprotection options more difficult, this change also makes it harder to find same-day confirmed change options that are legal but are not shown on united.com. Total bummer.

That said, I'm not sure that this change will achieve United's intended goal.

If the goal of this change was to stop people from calling United and saying "It says there is 'K' availability, why are you only offering me a V fare????", I think it'll probably work.

If the goal of this change was to stop people from calling United and saying "my upgrade hasn't cleared yet, guys, what is going on here?", then I'm not sure this is an effective change. The kind of people willing to call and ask about this stuff are also willing to jump through extra hoops to find out whether they need to call.

If the goal of this change was to stop third-party vendors like ExpertFlyer from making money by breaking the united.com terms of service and selling data obtained by spidering United's site, then I think UA will find that this change was not very effective. Assuming that third-party sites are willing to continue to break the united.com ToS, they should have no difficulty doing so.

I took a couple of hours after breakfast on a p.s. flight this morning to mock up a prototype that shows the kind of data unscrupulous third parties can still pull:

http://i.imgur.com/eO4Wq.png

(Screenshot of a tiny self-hosted Web app I just wrote.)

(By the way, p.s. post 3/3 doesn't seem to have changed at all in J. Still a great omelet. Still kind of iffy service on the breakfast flights — we seemed to "have had enough service" within an hour after the meal.)

This prototype is pretty slow (about 20 seconds) and takes a lot of round-trips -- three GETs and two POSTs. An unscrupulous third party could continue to retrieve and re-sell these data if their users were willing to tolerate higher latency. (They could report the exact R availability number by doing four times as many requests and using binary search.)

I don't write screen-scraping software for a living -- indeed I don't write much code at all these days. If I can pull these data with spotty Gogo wifi on a p.s. 757 between breakfast and the snack basket, just imagine how easy an expert would find it to circumvent United's latest changes!

So I don't think third-party data vendors will be gone for long (at least, if there are unscrupulous screen-scraping third parties selling data out there). I also don't think that UA will stop getting support calls saying "I waitlisted a GPU and my flight is R1 but I haven't cleared yet, please help".

I am fascinated to hear more about the kinds of problems caused by uninformed users calling up United as reported by UA Insider. Is this "why didn't my upgrade clear?!?!" or "why am I not getting a K fare?!" or something else entirely?

Yup. I was thinking award.

Bolding mine: So what was the intent? I asked earlier in this thread what the "issues" and data sharing you mentioned were and what the reasons for this change were and I'd still like to know. And as I also said, where I might not agree with the reason(s), being honest and up front with one's customers does lots for one's credibility as frankly, that has gone majorly downhill post 3/3 and United really needs to step up to the plate in that arena

Wow, I cant't even keep up with the thread, posts are coming up faster than I can read.

The part that bugged me the most is that they removed this feature before having an alternate solution avaliable. Isn't it common sense? I guess common sense isnt so common.

In addition to emailing Jeff, perhaps emails to news agencies, social media outlets would make more impact