Wow!!! Fantastic!! Willing to share the code behind it so we can all host it ourselves?

you are correct in my case. But sitting up front is the 100% reason I ever flew UA in the first place. That is all my GS is worth to me. If this goes away, I will just go to another airline. No big issue, since 90% of my travel is Intl C, which I upgrade to F. Lots of other airlines will take my C fare business.

Will any of the others upgrade you to F regularly on those C fares?

May or may not be the same approach as KVS, but KVS is significantly faster >10x.

KVS costs money and isn't Mac-compatible unless you virtualize.

Where did you get this silly idea that we didn't pay actual money, in significant amounts, to either get 1K status or earn the miles necessary to have an upgrade? I had bought several international C tickets on UA for cold, hard, solid cash this year before I decided to stop due to the deterioration of UA's entire product and their new treatment of elites. People pay plenty to get these upgrades, they just do so on an earlier flight than the one they get the so-called 'free' upgrade on.

Something like this (or other variations) requires intermediate-level programming skill. I am sure there are people pissed off enough to contemplate exactly this sort of thing, and if I am still upset on Monday morning, I might well be one of them. If I do, and it works, I promise that the results will be open source and free to use so that my work can be improved through a group effort.

I belong to a fishing group and as such this organization will rally members from time to time to send an email to some governors office or other such entity. Usually thse letters are a template and done to show how many constituents don't like a certain move.

Can this be done here? Besides walking away the only possible change of the decision makers to reverse this is a Ton of complaints. Still not likely but still better than 150 pages on ft.com

Send emails to smisek, the board, customer service.

Thank you. And if UA does ask you to remove it please let us know. That would be very telling if so.

Pretty sure this is the straw that gets me to switch to AA. :mad:

Oh, interesting!

Yes, it actually looks like you should be able to do this a lot faster. Looking at the wall-clock times of the five GET & POST requests I'm naively using, the total time is only 5.5 seconds. I think you could cut it down < 5 seconds if you cache session state. To get it down to 2s would have to involve some interesting optimizations.

This is really not something I'm good at! Wrapped in Python mechanize and recaptcha'd, I see performance of 18–20+ seconds.

Neat! Thanks for sharing. Looks like UNITED made this change for nothing.

Someone said it early on: information wants to be free. Trying to lock it down is stupid.

Of course we pay but the whole essence of this blind frequent flyer craze (of which I too am a victim) is a perception or belief that we are getting 'free upgrades' or 'free benefits'. It is a great con at the end of the day and as you rightly say we all pay for it in one way or the other. United would like us to pay twice...

Like breakfast at Hampton Inns, upgrades are NOT free.

They are INCLUDED. @:-)

This is like Hampton Inn saying 'Breakfast is included, but to get it you have to guess where it is going to be served. And if you guess wrong, no breakfast for you!'

+1 ^ Mherdeg!!!

I hate this change too & the low-road path UA is currently on but I suspect, as Goalie mentioned earlier, we are exactly the group that micro-manages their itineraries & drives UA crazy! Maybe we are not individually "scraping" UA site, but others, from whom we all use, reference, benefit, are. Getting 100% agreement from all of us here & on MP probably has all of UAL management high-fiving & doing jigs!

My thanks to mherdeg for the very useful link!

Really just a classic move from the PMCO playbook.

I'm not sure it's so much a Harvard MBA thesis project than yet another "Wizard of Oz little man behind the green curtain" gambit.

The Expert function left the little man far too exposed, frantically pulling and pushing his levers and gauges.

PMCO always distrusted transparency, that's why their EUA was always so theatrically convoluted and labyrinthine (see the countless threads in the PMCO forum about upgrade priority, sweeps, missed upgrade windows, check-in priority, etc.)

That's also why SHARES is so clunky and opaque. Its main purpose is to provide the line employee with the the minimum flexibility, and to "dynamically" price tickets and upgrades...(that's corporate double-speak for bilking the customer as much as possible).

It's all very clever and a little devious, but perhaps the only part that's too transparent is their motive which is to rake the customer over the coals for the most $$$ possible...

If there were really as clever as they think, they would make their true intention somewhat more opaque.