UA blocks Third Party Sites (TripIt Pro/Award Wallet/etc.) from Accessing M+ Accounts
 

Just received this from TripIt, disappointing to say the least.

Dear TripIt Pro member,
We are writing because our records show that you are tracking your United MileagePlus account with TripIt Pro's point-tracker feature.

United no longer allows third-party services to access MileagePlus accounts. Starting tomorrow, TripIt Pro can no longer track your United MileagePlus miles, but we'll continue to store your account number for you.

Why is this happening?
There are differing opinions in the travel industry about whether your reward-program accounts should be accessible to third parties to whom you've given permission. Some travel providers have decided not to allow this access.

What is TripIt doing about it?
TripIt, on behalf of travelers everywhere, will continue to drive conversations with travel-industry partners towards a solution that works for everyone.

In the meantime, we're focused on growth and new features. In fact, we've expanded TripIt Pro's point tracker to 120 reward programs, including air, hotel, transportation, parking, dining, and credit card rewards. Plus you can can now add new programs to your account from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (coming soon to Android).

In line with TripIt's mission to make life easier for travelers, our goal is to give you secure access to as many of your reward programs as possible, in one place.

What can you do?
Speak up. Declare your right to share your personal travel data with third parties like TripIt. Make your voice heard by contacting your airline reward program; and by joining the conversation on our blog, Facebook, and Twitter using the #freemypoints hashtag.

I suppose it was only a matter of time with AA (& DL?) blocking the various points trackers.

:td: to COdbaUA.

And when there's a security breach, does the customer yell at United or at Tripit? Who's at fault?

I'd say this is overreacting. Services like mint.com allow you to pool your financial services information from multiple sources for analysis. If you choose to provide the access to the third party then you accept the associated liabilities. Perhaps airlines (and other firms) can develop a "third party authenticator" to add to the existing userID/password combo to be used when you want a machine/third party to access your data.

:td::td::td:
If I choose to give out my number and password to others, that's my choice.

Ummm ... nobody's at fault yet as no database breach has occurred.
If/when such breach does occur then wouldn't the fault lie with the system that was breached ?

And WN who started it all. Still quite unfortunate that UA has chosen this path. :td:

But let's not forget that UAdbaUA was reasonably aggressive in pushing to stop scraping of its site for various inventory resources. Hardly a COdbaUA moment here.

I'm well-aware of that fact. I'm just postulating as to why UA and American and Southwest are doing this proactively.

I wonder if this will affect UsingMiles as well?

That's a fair point.
But do we know that the airline's main incentive here is security ?
Or is it that when getting balances from Trip-It, we're not seeing the advertising banners on the airline's web (tho I doubt frequent users pay ant attention to them ... I know I don't).
Or maybe, like sbm12 kinda mentioned, it's the issue of 3rd parties doing massive hits to scrape the database ?

Probably many reasons why the decision was made. But as always, it was made totally without regard to the customer's point of view. Once again, what a lot of us consider a useful tool, has been yanked from under our seats without any justification being given.

Award wallet next ?

I yell at United for allowing access with a 4-digit PIN.

This :td: :td: :td:



And it looks like you can still e-mail TripIt basic info for itineraries? Annoying nonetheless.

it is. once AAdvantage blocked off tripit for monitoring points, i basically gave up from using tripit to monitor that. i just keep a mental tally now. annoying, but what can you do, seems to not just be an isolated AA (or now UA) thing.

One step forward, three steps back

Per a conversation I'm having right now with folks at UA PR, UsingMiles is not affected. They have agreed to a formal data sharing arrangement with UA to cover their access.

ETA: Here is the full statement I got from UA:

Just got an e-mail from LinkedIn that their new profile is being forced on me tomorrow. TripIt's My Travel integration isn't compatible with the new profile, and therefore the app will be disabled. Not a good week for TripIt!

The formatting has been pretty funky since 3/3 and I find I have to enter more fields manually now.