Airlines going after "scraping" pages

[simpsontruckdriver]

In this case, scraping means a bot goes onto airlines' sites and finds availability of award seats. For a normal person, it is hit-and-miss, you pick a flight and either there are awards seats or not. Pages like these find award seats and lists them so you don't need to search.

TS

 

[davidvel]

Interesting. Airlines could cut down on this by requiring you to log into your account before searching for award flights, and only showing availability based upon your mileage balance. They could then throttle and take other steps if unusual activity (like constantly looking and never booking) is tied to your account or IP address. In fact, it seems they could do some of these steps anyway.

 

[jabberwocky]

I just canceled my subscription to EF which was really useful for identifying flights where I was highly likely to be upgraded to business for free.

The issue of brokers is strange to my mind - it used to be really easy to find award seats with partner airlines. Now more airlines are moving to dynamically priced awards and want you to book that seat with them for 120,000 miles rather than 50,000 with a partner. So there are fewer available to their partners at the standard rewards rates.

As such, you really need a lot of patience and extra time to find available seats (constantly manually searching for partner flights). Alternatively, you could use one of these companies that regularly checks other websites (which are displaying public information) and alerts you when something you are interested comes available.

It is kind of like if someone were to set up a search on interval alerting them to available exchanges at certain resorts for certain time periods. The TUG sightings forum is an example of something that could be shut down if the legal theory behind this is correct as it has a similar purpose (just not automated).

I paid a fee for EF, but some others like Cowtool were free. There is a huge discussion about this over in FlyerTalk if you’re interested.

 

[emeryjre]

Interesting. Airlines could cut down on this by requiring you to log into your account before searching for award flights, and only showing availability based upon your mileage balance. They could then throttle and take other steps if unusual activity (like constantly looking and never booking) is tied to your account or IP address. In fact, it seems they could do some of these steps anyway.

The airlines could do many things if they had the computing horsepower and people with top notch coding expertise
Just like Marriott

 

[sponger76]

The airlines could do many things if they had the computing horsepower and people with top notch coding expertise
Just like Marriott

I wouldn't hold my breath. Airline IT systems are notoriously bad, and when it comes to catastrophic failures, maybe worse than timeshares.

 

[emeryjre]

I wouldn't hold my breath. Airline IT systems are notoriously bad, and when it comes to catastrophic failures, maybe worse than timeshares.

It was a sarcastic remark
When the hamsters slow down, there is huge concern about the servers crashing

 

[sponger76]

It was a sarcastic remark
When the hamsters slow down, there is huge concern about the servers crashing

Well, they do need to increase the hamster feed budget, and get more efficient turbines connected to the wheels.

 

[dioxide45]

Websites can instituate things like reCaptcha to prevent bots scraping their data, but then that irritates regular users. The airlines would rather sell access to their APIs for a fee, kind of like what X and Reddit are doing. As to if sites can legally scrape data, they do need to comply with the website terms of use.

 

[dioxide45]

Shouldn't these kinds of threads be in the "Vacation Travel Information" forum. I see a lot of travel type threads just dumped in the TUG Lounge...

 

[davidvel]

The airlines could do many things if they had the computing horsepower and people with top notch coding expertise
Just like Marriott

I wouldn't hold my breath. Airline IT systems are notoriously bad, and when it comes to catastrophic failures, maybe worse than timeshares.

Airline systems to Marriott is like comparing a 2024 BMW to a Model T. If airlines had Marriott's web IT crew, they would still be using paper tickets written by hand on that red colored carbon paper.