AwardWallet receives compensation from advertising partners for links on the blog. The opinions expressed here are our own and have not been reviewed, provided, or approved by any bank advertiser. Here's our complete list of Advertisers.
If you're like me, you remember the days of logging into every airline program and searching for award flights one by one to your intended destination. Then, along came programs like ExpertFlyer, Seats.aero, and others, simplifying the process by letting you search “home to vacation spot” across multiple frequent flyer programs at once. However, recent issues are creating problems for travelers who have enjoyed using these tools to simplify the search process.
Here's what's going on.
ExpertFlyer Loses Access to Multiple Programs
ExpertFlyer has had…some issues this year. While the previous issues — where the site couldn't even perform simple searches — have been resolved at present, the current issue is a massive loss from the number of airlines the website supports.
Previously, you could set alerts, track real-time seat availability, and look for flight awards on numerous airlines with ExpertFlyer. Now, a full 29 airlines are no longer supported. This includes a huge swath of Star Alliance.
After users first noticed the issues themselves, ExpertFlyer later confirmed the changes via email:
Due to issues in obtaining award and upgrade data for the below airlines, we have removed them from our list of supported airlines in the Award & Upgrade search for the time being. This also means that any active Flight Alerts for those airlines are not currently working. We're reaching out because you had at least one active alert that is affected by this outage. The affected airlines are:
- Adria Airways
- Air Canada
- Air China International
- Air India
- Air New Zealand
- ANA
- Asiana Airlines
- Austrian Airlines
- Avianca
- Avianca Costa Rica
- Brussels Airlines
- Copa
- Croatia Airlines
- Egyptair
- Ethiopian Airlines
- EVA Air
- LOT Polish Airlines
- Lufthansa
- SAS
- Shenzhen Airlines
- Singapore Airlines
- South African Airways
- SWISS
- TACA
- TAP Air Portugal
- Thai Airways International
- United Airlines
- Virgin Australia
- Vistara
While ExpertFlyer's email does say “for the time being,” there's no timeline provided for when (or if) these airlines will be supported again. And these major issues come on the heels of other quirks recently, such as incessant emails over the span of 10 minutes, rather than just sending a single email for the alert in question.
These ongoing problems lead to an underlying question of how useful ExpertFlyer might be going forward.
Seats.aero Receives “Cease & Desist” Letter From Air Canada
Seats.aero is an award search tool that can help you find flights for redeeming your points and miles. That includes setting alerts for a particular flight or searching across wide regions like “Southeast Asia.” Seats.aero provides a list of its recent findings, helping you see what's available, by conducting routine searches across the supported frequent flyer programs.
And that seems to be the issue.
Mark Nasr, Air Canada’s Executive Vice President of Marketing and Digital, recently made some interesting comments in a Facebook Live interview, hinting that the airline would be making big moves to help improve award availability. Now, Air Canada has served a legal notice, demanding Seats.aero stop pulling award availability from Aeroplan.
This email was sent to users:
We want to provide an update on Seats.aero 1support for Air Canada Aeroplan. On Thursday, Air Canada had its attorney send a cease and desist letter to Seats.aero. Their letter demanded that we must stop retrieving availability from Aeroplan just 25 hours after receiving the letter. Their letter appears rushed and we believe it has no valid legal basis or argument, and could apply to any site or tool that searches Air Canada Aeroplan for reward availability.
Seats.aero works by periodically visiting the public websites of airlines and retrieving the reward availability for each date and route. This common practice is usually called “web scraping” or similar names and is used by all travel tools in some form. Courts have routinely held that retrieving public information from public websites is legal and does not require us to follow any restrictions the airlines may try to arbitrarily impose, as we are just visiting their public websites.
It appears that Air Canada is trying to intimidate us into shutting down Seats.aero’s support for Air Canada, and potentially other travel sites as well. We do not intend to comply with their request and will continue to maintain Seats.aero’s support for Aeroplan for the foreseeable future. We are confident in our position, and if needed, we will see Air Canada in court and defend our practices to the fullest extent possible.
Thanks for your support,
Ian Carroll
Founder, Seats.aero
Our Take
The timing is interesting, obviously. After a representative of Air Canada hinted that the airline would take drastic action against online brokers and others complicating award availability, Seats.aero and ExpertFlyer have experienced their own (very different but possibly related) issues. ExpertFlyer has removed support for numerous airlines, not just Air Canada, while Seats.aero received a notice from Air Canada that the founder says he intends to ignore.
The existence of an award search tool to help you find a seat you can book with points for your next vacation is likely not the issue creating award availability shortages. How these situations play out in the future will merit attention, as the programs supported will factor into your decisions on what tools you use and how much you're willing to pay for them.
The comments on this page are not provided, reviewed, or otherwise approved by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.