Oct 30, 2013, 3:36 pm
Last edit by: Ocn Vw 1K
UA Insider's reply in posts 247 and 254 of this thread:
Hi everyone,
We recognize the importance and value to you of accessible and transparent information about United flights. It’s a meaningful part of your travel planning, and we are committed to providing useful information that is both accurate and preserves the integrity of United’s data and systems.
While we are committed to data transparency, Expert Flyer has been accessing united.com in an unauthorized fashion to retrieve UA availability. In addition, these activities have consumed significant united.com bandwidth that could otherwise be used by regular consumers. As a result, we had to take this action to protect the security and integrity of United’s systems.
Thank you for your understanding as to why we had to take this action. We continue to look at ways in which we can provide you with timely and useful information (some of which you will see in new releases of our own digital channels) as well as with partners that have authorized access to our data.
Aaron Goldberg
Sr. Manager - Customer Experience Planning
United Airlines
We recognize the importance and value to you of accessible and transparent information about United flights. It’s a meaningful part of your travel planning, and we are committed to providing useful information that is both accurate and preserves the integrity of United’s data and systems.
While we are committed to data transparency, Expert Flyer has been accessing united.com in an unauthorized fashion to retrieve UA availability. In addition, these activities have consumed significant united.com bandwidth that could otherwise be used by regular consumers. As a result, we had to take this action to protect the security and integrity of United’s systems.
Thank you for your understanding as to why we had to take this action. We continue to look at ways in which we can provide you with timely and useful information (some of which you will see in new releases of our own digital channels) as well as with partners that have authorized access to our data.
Aaron Goldberg
Sr. Manager - Customer Experience Planning
United Airlines
UA Blocking Expert Flyer and KVS Access to R and Elite Award Searches.
Nov 11, 2013, 11:00 pm
#631
Join Date: Apr 2011
Posts: 288
Probably not...
EFV has said many times that alerts are checked a few times a day at the outset, not every hour. Either way the amount of people using United.com is much, much more. However this is all irrelevant, the problem here is with UA, surprisingly. I received this email from EF support:
The pressure needs to be put on UA to stop being stupid, not guessing about something we will never actually know for sure about. It's amazing that UA thinks that potentially working with a service that helps their loyal customers stay loyal is a bad thing, such paranoia. Maybe United needs to focus on that first, something one might call "Customer Experience", better known as Aaron Goldberg's job.
With regard to United Award and Upgrade inventory, that information is currently unavailable at the request of United. ExpertFlyer is attempting to negotiate an agreement with UAL. So far, UAL has made not made any offer, or counter offer, of their own. However, we continue to discuss the matter with UAL in hopes of reaching a mutually agreeable conclusion.
Nov 12, 2013, 5:36 am
#632
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Between AUS, EWR, and YTO In a little twisty maze of airline seats, all alike.. but I wanna go home with the armadillo
Programs: CO, NW, & UA forum moderator emeritus
Posts: 35,429
sely because I knew comments like this were coming:EF can say whatever it wants about how often it queried, etc. Tools such as this do create a load on a server. How large depends on the configuration and we know pretty little about that. The point of fact is that UA, the source of the data, didn't appreciate it. Whether that was for data load reasons or for competitive reasons or something else does not matter. The point is that the data belongs to UA and they can control it however they wish to do so. From a consumer perspective it may stink, but given what else we've seen from UA of late this is just icing on a rather unpleasant tasting cake.
Last edited by Xyzzy; Nov 12, 2013 at 5:43 am
Nov 12, 2013, 6:59 am
#633
Join Date: Jun 2013
Location: RDU
Posts: 735
I feel bad for canceling my EF subscription because it's a great site/service. If the functionality returns I'll definitely renew.
Nov 12, 2013, 8:14 am
#634
Suspended
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: ORD / DUB / LHR
Programs: UA 1K MM; BA Silver; Marriott Plat
Posts: 8,243
Plenty of variables in here, and feel free to challenge them but this is a starting point for those who are sceptical about the load from 4-6 searches per second:
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
Nov 13, 2013, 1:11 am
#635
Join Date: Dec 2012
Location: back to Europe
Programs: FB Plat for Life & Marriott lifetime Platinum
Posts: 236
Searching R space / Alternatives to EF
Pleased so far with EF, I was not familiar with the issue before the latest UA decision - Beyond scrolling this thread for the past 20 pages, I found all my answers by reading :
Eddy
Eddy
Nov 13, 2013, 9:05 am
#636
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: BOS, PVG
Programs: United 1K and 1MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 10,000
Plenty of variables in here, and feel free to challenge them but this is a starting point for those who are sceptical about the load from 4-6 searches per second:
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
It looks quite impressive that EF would generate that many searches.
If this is true, then EF should pay UA for access of data.
Nov 13, 2013, 9:50 am
#637
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: EWR
Programs: UA Gold, UA MM, Marriott Gold, Hilton Diamond
Posts: 1,329
Plenty of variables in here, and feel free to challenge them but this is a starting point for those who are sceptical about the load from 4-6 searches per second:
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
Nov 13, 2013, 9:57 am
#638
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Between AUS, EWR, and YTO In a little twisty maze of airline seats, all alike.. but I wanna go home with the armadillo
Programs: CO, NW, & UA forum moderator emeritus
Posts: 35,429
Nov 13, 2013, 10:21 am
#639
Join Date: Apr 2011
Posts: 288
Well given...
I received this email from EF support:
With regard to United Award and Upgrade inventory, that information is currently unavailable at the request of United. ExpertFlyer is attempting to negotiate an agreement with UAL. So far, UAL has made not made any offer, or counter offer, of their own. However, we continue to discuss the matter with UAL in hopes of reaching a mutually agreeable conclusion.
Nov 13, 2013, 10:48 am
#640
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Between AUS, EWR, and YTO In a little twisty maze of airline seats, all alike.. but I wanna go home with the armadillo
Programs: CO, NW, & UA forum moderator emeritus
Posts: 35,429
On the contrary, it looks like that's exactly what happened. EF has had UA award/upgrade information for years, so it was nothing new and it has been mentioned that EF was a source of this information on FT for years as well. Also none of the other UA screen scrapers were shutdown, so it would appear that EF was targeted, maybe a change in policy at UA.
n of UA. EF wasn't collecting data just once an hour for close-in stuff. I have no idea what the collection rates were, but all those queries do add up.
Last edited by Xyzzy; Nov 13, 2013 at 11:52 am Reason: Whoops!
Nov 13, 2013, 10:54 am
#641
Moderator: United Airlines
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: SFO
Programs: UA Plat 1.995MM, Hyatt Discoverist, Marriott Plat/LT Gold, Hilton Silver, IHG Plat
Posts: 66,854
Plenty of variables in here, and feel free to challenge them but this is a starting point for those who are sceptical about the load from 4-6 searches per second:
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
Pax count is UA's full-year number for last year, all of the other figures are estimates in the absence of any hard data.
United Airlines and United Express operate an average of 5,341 flights a day to more than 360 airports across six continents. In 2012, United and United Express carried more passenger traffic than any other airline in the world and operated nearly two million flights carrying 140 million customers.
Count you explain how the EF number was derived? -- what were your assumptions.
Last edited by WineCountryUA; Nov 13, 2013 at 10:59 am
Nov 13, 2013, 11:15 am
#642
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: ATL
Programs: UA:MM 1K HH:Diamond IHG:Plat Marriott:Plat
Posts: 652
I have another (wacko) theory as to why EF access was yanked. Being in the computer industry, I think these query numbers are really, really small to make a big difference to UA. I think they yanked it to avoid people skipping the upgrade line when R opens up and their stupid system does not process the upgrade waitlist immediately. People can still manually search for R space but it is probability that the automated batch job runs between two manual queries is much higher.
Nov 13, 2013, 11:28 am
#643
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: EWR
Programs: UA Gold, UA MM, Marriott Gold, Hilton Diamond
Posts: 1,329
Again it's total speculation. I would argue that UA decided to stop EF because EF was exposing a problem in their CPU process. Maybe they really did care about elites getting jumped in the queue ( highly doubt it) but to say they stopped EF because of load on their website is pure speculation. No one else provides this service (other than KVS) so who else IS there to pick on??? And we know why they can't stop KVS, if they could they would IMO.
Nov 13, 2013, 11:31 am
#644
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: BOS, PVG
Programs: United 1K and 1MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 10,000
How does the 21.8M related to the following from http://www.unitedcontinentalholdings.com/
is the 21.18M tickets / PNRs and 140M counting each segment? average of 6 segment / ticket seems high.
Count you explain how the EF number was derived? -- what were your assumptions.
is the 21.18M tickets / PNRs and 140M counting each segment? average of 6 segment / ticket seems high.
Count you explain how the EF number was derived? -- what were your assumptions.
2) He probably assumed that EF does hourly inquiries on alerts so 126,144,000 searches per year translates to 14400 alerts total in any given hour.
Then he assumes that at ANY given time, there are 1200 EF subscribers with 12 alerts. All UA.
:-::-::-:
Nov 13, 2013, 11:50 am
#645
Suspended
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: ORD / DUB / LHR
Programs: UA 1K MM; BA Silver; Marriott Plat
Posts: 8,243
How does the 21.8M related to the following from http://www.unitedcontinentalholdings.com/
Full year passenger numbers are obviously quite a bit higher