AA's award and upgrades come out of revenue fare buckets. They actually sell A and C fares, which also happen to be the buckets for miles/eVIP upgrades. I don't know if they sell Z, U, or T fares (which the sAAver awards come from), but they've chosen to make those available to GDS users as well. Consequently, AA award/upgrade availability is available on any GDS. United upgrades do not track to revenue buckets (in most cases) and they have chosen not to publish the buckets on any GDS that I know of (I certainly don't have access to them as a Sabre subscriber). In fact, Sabre isn't even capable of handling 2-letter classes like IN or XN.

I don't know how EF is getting UA availability ... I always assumed they had some sort of agreement with UA, but given that EF lost UA award availability with this change, I'm inclined to believe that they were scraping it without United's permission.

Yes, it's gone, and good luck getting UA to see the error of its ways.

In multiple posts in this thread, Flyertalkers have assessd blame on Expert Flyer for causing UA to remove this data. Several other Flyertalkers have asserted that EF doesn't come by this data legitimately; instead, they claim, EF merely scrapes the UA site. Expert Flyer tells users that it contracts with two GDS for the data that it transmits.

Which is it?

I was using united's site just fine. What issues were you having?

Does it matter which it is? No one will ever know the reason beyond the crap UA is feeding us. There is no point in speculating.

That poster apparently thinks the terrible .bomb performance was due to EF and KVS scraping data--verses the much more plausible explanation that the code like so much else cobbled together by the COdbaUA IT team simply sucks.

:confused: You do realize that ExpertFlyer is more useful, even more necessary for AA than UA, don't you? But if it makes you feel good to stick it to 'em, then by all means...

Maybe it's just me but UA's website/front-end is imo pretty usable.

Now, there have been myriad other IT issues (upgrade process anyone?, 4-mile intl itin?) which cannot be attributed to KVS/EF 'hammering' the website. This is just plain crappy IT. If this is what people are referring to, get a clue.

Agree. There seems to be a handful of people on both side of that particular aspect of EF that clearly have stakes in it - but aren't saying.

The reality is, for the rest of us that simply use it to find award availability - that's gone. And no amount of pretending we care which way EF gets the data is going to make that come back.

I've never seen a C fare for sale on AA. AA's revenue biz class full fare is J. Discount biz fares include D, I and R. No C. C is exclusively used for upgrade space to biz on all 3-class flights and on international 2-class flights.

No, Z, U and T are not revenue fare buckets - just sAAver award buckets.

The disappearance of the UA data from EF doesn't prove to me that EF was obtaining the data by scraping it from UA. For all we know, EF was obtaining it from UA but told to stop making the data available. Not unlike the disappearance of the AA UDU/Sticker upgrade data (X and R) which EF said it would no longer get from the GDS.

It's reassuring to know that even in the face of such a universally hated change, that there are still one or two UA apologists around.

As for me, I'm no longer booking a C SFO-LHR roundtrip that I was planning to do over Xmas -- I had discovered that despite my best efforts not to re-qualify as 1k, previously booked tickets would have put it within reach with this one trip. I am sure UA didn't want my $3k anyway, they'll make it up in a flash by selling upgades to kettles and denying them to elites.

What you're missing is that they don't want you to upgrade. Ever.

They want you to buy the ticket, sit down, and shut up.

Meanwhile, they'll sell a TOD to a kettle to get incremental revenue from the F seat that you wanted to UG into.

That's what this is really about.

I don't write code, but a thought occured to me:

How difficult would it be for someone to write a small program to query the UA.com that checks the 'Upgrade' box for a particular city pair on a psrticular date and redo it until it gets a '0'. Thus one would know how many 'R' seats are available.
Is it that easy or am I missing somethig?

I'll bet there are coders on this as we type. ;) .. God forbid we 'break' .bomb ..

Not if I buy/ticket with LH and then only credit miles back. Far, far less cash.

not a UA apologist, but an IT guy that knows the reality of screen scrapes, they are evil when they aren't programmed perfectly.

This mixup isn't much different than the AA and Kayak tiff in 2008 really. Airlines want money when their data is used.
My hope now is they will get their issues settled and this will come back in some form, and allow them access without the brutal impact of screen scrapes.

Fair enough ... regardless, AA publishes the data voluntarily, while UA has never published it through any GDS. I've never pretended like I really know where EF is getting its data ... I just know it isn't via a standard GDS subscription, and I have trouble believing that EF would voluntarily pull its data so quickly in a way that precisely coincides with the website change.