Savvy Traveler

I'll add to what others have said: I am now wasting significant amount of UA agents time to search for things that I formerly did on EF. And since I book travel (mostly awards and upgrades) professionally, I am on the phone with them all the time now.

What a totally shortsighted move by United. This is not the airline I switched to in 2004 and was very happy with (as a 1K) for many years.

jackal

I think those numbers are high.

In October 2013, there were 202 individual FlyerTalk members who posted an average of at least once per day in the United forum. (Also, the ratio of guests-to-members in the forum at any given time is approximately 2.5 to one, so you can assume there are ~700 people who check the UA forum daily.)

Since I suspect FT makes up the vast majority of EF's audience--anyone who cares enough to pay $10/month probably also checks FT pretty regularly--that means there are roughly 700 UA flyers who are EF's target audience. What's the percentage of those who subscribe to EF? 80%? 50%? 30%? I suspect it's on the lower end. I know a LOT of people on FT who do not subscribe to EF.

Also, 12 searches per user is high. I've never had more than 5 in my account for any single airline at any given time. Also, the majority of those are for flights several months out. I'm very sure those are not being checked hourly--maybe a couple times a day at most. It might be hourly in the last 4-5 days before departure, but that has been 0 of my alerts for a few months now.

So, I'll assume the following:

200 active UA flyer subscribers to EF
5 searches per user at any given time
20% of those searches being checked hourly; the other 80% being checked every six hours
8000 total searches per day
0.09 searches per second
2.9 million searches per year, or 3.9% of the total load on UA's systems (based on the table posted by star_world)

That's one search every eleven seconds...a far cry from 4 per second!

Even if my numbers are significantly off, it's still a lot lower than 4 per second.

I continue to think United is doing this for other reasons. I don't know what it is--maybe they don't want us to have easy access to the data, or maybe they just don't like that EF is exploiting their site (even though it doesn't actually affect anything). But it's an ideological decision, not a practical one.

Daniel-SYD

I've also started dialing united almost daily when traveling. I've also put some alerts in EF for thing like C5 when less than five days and C3 less than 3 day out just to help with optimizing my calling pattern. As a GS this has worked so far in terms of asking nicely if the upgrade has now cleared.

Obviously this isn't as good as PN or R alerts. Curious if anyone else has other fare class alert metrics that work.

RichardInSF

Look, the data on the number of searches done by EF is available to someone; i.e., it can be computed by the owners of EF. I'd like to see them comment. The fact that they apparently haven't so far is, at least, interesting but then I haven't read all the posts in this long thread, maybe I missed their reply.

My reply to EF was that if they don't get this back, I'm not going to renew. I turned off auto-renewal. If KVS has the info and EF doesn't, that is pretty much a clincher.

jackal

They haven't replied, and nor would I expect them to. They haven't even admitted anywhere publicly that they were scraping United.com, even though it is obvious to us that they were. I wouldn't expect them to make that admission anywhere that UA could get wind of it, as it would cause complications in the event of legal action.

exerda

So UA has been blocking EF for a few weeks now.

Why is .bomb not any faster for me?

3card

What is the alternative for award searches with EF gone? Calling and/or looking on .bomb (multiple times) each day? Booking wrong day/time and waitlisting? Some other tool? Curious what others are doing.

kb1992

In fact, it's slower for me.

Eddy421

^ Excellent remark !! ^

Lurker1999

The complete lack of a response in this thread by Expertflyer Voice is highly telling.

For awards the ANA search tool and KVS are reasonable substitutes except for the lack of notifications.

Mike Jacoubowsky

OK, if we want to deal with this seriously, UA may be outsourcing its computer muscle, or, if they have excess capacity, renting it to others. Computing in "the cloud" is a very different thing than having your own IBM 360/70 mainframe. There may be a variable cost based on load, and UA may choose to pay for a given level of speed... and if they can reduce the load, it will cost less for the same amount of speed.

OK, it's a bit of a stretch, but it could be true. And that would open up the possibility of variable speeds for different users maybe?

Hmm. So the next CC benefit will be a faster web experience? I was going to say the next elite benefit, but it's pretty clear they're more interested in adding CC features these days.

Mike Jacoubowsky

Telling? Of what, that the ship has sunk? That United threatened them with a huge lawsuit unless they settled and signed an NDA?

exerda

Same here.

Not only can I no longer use ExpertFlyer for alerts (or for quick, painless searches), but UA.bomb is now slower than ever.

star_world

Full UA site has worked fine on Android Chrome for me for as long as I can remember, including Expert Mode. I have several colleagues who use it regularly for this purpose also. This sounds like it may be an issue with your phone / device.

exerda

I have had the same problem on an original Motorola Droid (Verizon), a Motorola Droid Razr Maxx (Verizon), and a Motorola Atrix 2 (unlocked GSM). Any time I try to use the booking engine, the site refuses to take the form input.