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Update 3/14/2024: The judge in the case has rejected Air Canada's filing for a preliminary injunction, allowing Seats.Aero to continue supporting Aeroplan award availability while the case moves forward.
Seats.Aero is one of the best new points and miles tools to burst onto the scene in the past year. Particularly as ExpertFlyer continues its decline, Seats.Aero has become a critical tool for finding award availability across a range of dates and routes. Now, the service is in jeopardy as Air Canada has filed a lawsuit against Seats.Aero, seeking millions in damages in its attempts to shut down the service.
After issuing a cease and desist letter against Seats.Aero on October 5, 2023, Air Canada filed a lawsuit against Seats.Aero on October 19, 2023. Among its requests for relief, Air Canada is seeking over $75,000 in actual damages and up to $2 million in statutory damages — amounts that will certainly bankrupt the fledgling new service.
Here's an overview of the lawsuit, Seat.Aero's rebuttal, and what this could mean for other award availability websites.
Air Canada Lawsuit Claims Against Seats.Aero
Air Canada's lawsuit levies eight specific complaints against Seats.Aero — and specifically its founder Ian Carroll — ranging from “violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030” to “trespass to chattels.” Let's recap the many claims made in the 50-page filing (ignoring the extraneous list of awards Air Canada includes in its filing).
AwardWallet reached out to Air Canada with clarifying questions about this lawsuit. However, Air Canada declined to comment. So, we only have its legal filing as a reference.
Violations of Air Canada's anti-scrapping terms and conditions
The first aspect for which Air Canada is suing Seats.Aero is for violating its terms and conditions by scrapping information from its website:
In direct violation of the Air Canada Group’s web terms and conditions, Carroll uses automated digital robots (or “bots”) to continuously search for and harvest data from the Air Canada Group’s website and database.
Air Canada's systems can't handle Seats.Aero scraping
Air Canada claims that Seats.Aero's actions damage Air Canada's “business relations with its partners and customers”:
His intrusions are frequent and rapacious, causing multiple levels of harm, e.g., placing an immense strain on the Air Canada Group’s computer infrastructure, impairing the integrity and availability of the Air Canada Group’s data, soiling the customer experience with the Air Canada Group, interfering with the Air Canada Group’s business relations with its partners and customers, and diverting the Air Canada Group’s resources to repair the damage.
Further, the lawsuit claims that Seat.Aero's scraping requests have single-handedly shut down its website:
Defendant’s voluminous requests have placed such immense burdens on the Air Canada Group’s infrastructure that it has caused “brownouts.” During a brownout, a website is unresponsive for a period of time because the capacity of requests exceeds the capacity the website was designed to accommodate. During brownouts caused by Defendant’s data scraping, legitimate customers are unable to use <www.aircanada.com> or the Air Canada + Aeroplan mobile app
Air Canada is seeking actual damages exceeding $75,000 for these actions.
Trademark violations
Four of Air Canada's eight legal complaints hinge on Seats.Aero's uses of Air Canada and Aeroplan trademarks. Air Canada specifically claims that Seats.Aero:
- Uses a “counterfeit of Air Canada’s and Aeroplan’s federally registered marks”
- This use of the Aeroplan marks “is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive”
- This use constitutes “trademark infringement, false designation of origin, and unfair competition”
- Finally, these actions “are likely to dilute the distinctive quality of the Air Canada Group’s famous Air Canada and Aeroplan marks”
Air Canada specifically claims that Seats.Aero's use these trademarks to “mislead people” into believing that Seats.Aero is connected with Air Canada:
Carroll uses the Air Canada Group's federally registered trademarks and logo to mislead people into believing that his site, app, and activities are connected with and/or approved by the real Air Canada Group and lending an air of legitimacy to his site and app
The only evidence of this trademark violation presented in Air Canada's lawsuit shows an Aeroplan logo in a dropdown menu:
Air Canada is seeking the most in damages for this complaint, seeking up to $2 million in damages “for each type of service sold, offered for sale, or distributed by Defendant under the Air Canada and Aeroplan marks.” Air Canada doesn't specify how many such services it alleges Seats.Aero is offering.
Rebuttal by Seats.Aero
Ian Carroll, the founder and CEO of Seats.Aero, provided several statements to AwardWallet about his stance on this lawsuit. First, Carroll notes that Air Canada wouldn't work with him before taking legal action — even though he offered to modify the service's scraping methods:
Air Canada filed this lawsuit today without working with us beforehand or accepting our offer to modify our searches/scraping as needed. Air Canada has never tried to work with us on any concerns before sending us a cease and desist.
Regarding Air Canada's claims that Seats.Aero overloads its systems, Carroll claims that Seats.Aero hasn't received any pushback from retrieving availability from other airlines at the same rate:
Air Canada is alleging that we are retrieving availability too quickly for Star Alliance to handle, but we retrieve availability from other Star Alliance airlines (United/SAS) at the same rate, and they appear to have no IT issues coming from it and have never complained to us.
We have built our systems to protect the airlines from excessive load, as we search Air Canada for availability at a fixed rate and have controls in place to rate limit all requests sent to Air Canada's systems.
Finally, Carroll makes the argument that Seats.Aero actually saves Air Canada resources:
When our users view Aeroplan results on Seats.aero, they no longer have to go run the same search on Aeroplan's site, saving them resources.
Carroll resents being framed as “malicious hackers” by Air Canada. Carroll claims that he has worked with Air Canada in the past to “resolve serious cybersecurity issues in their own systems” and was compensated for doing so through Air Canada's bug bounty program. Air Canada declined to comment on AwardWallet's request to confirm this claim.
My Take on Air Canada's Lawsuit Against Seats.Aero
Air Canada's lawsuit against Seats.Aero seems like a desperate grasping at straws in attempt to stunt the growth of points and miles award availability websites.
Courts have recently ruled that web scraping is legal. In 2022, the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals (hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn) specifically ruled that scrapping data from a publicly available website isn't in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the law that Air Canada specifically alleges in its lawsuit that Seats.Aero is violating. However, it's worth noting that LinkedIn eventually forced a settlement for hiQ Labs' violation of LinkedIn's user terms.
Most of Air Canada's complaints hinge on Seats.Aero's use of its trademark name and logo. Air Canada claims that Seat.Aero's use of the Aeroplan name and logo is intended to mislead users into thinking Seats.Aero is “approved by the real Air Canada Group.” That's an absurd claim on its face. It's not reasonable to argue that the inclusion of a small logo in a dropdown box alongside a dozen other logos constitutes approval by Air Canada.
For this specific trademark violation, Air Canada is seeking up to $2 million in statutory damages.
Another point made by Seats.Aero specifically resonates with me: How it actually reduces the use of Air Canada resources. As a frequent mileage traveler myself, I rarely search Air Canada's website anymore — at least until I'm ready to book a flight. Air Canada has made the award search process so tedious that many travelers would rather use another alternative to find availability.
OMG @AirCanada Can you PLEASE stop requesting a verification code. Every. Single. Time. I. Try. And. Log. In. Throw a cookie, throw ten cookies. Put an entire bakery on my computer, I don't care, but this constant email verification is beyond ridiculous. @Aeroplan COME ON…
— No Mas Coach (@NoMasCoach) January 26, 2023
It's possible that getting Seats.Aero shutdown won't actually reduce the load on Air Canada's servers due to the number of award travelers that would have to start searching on Air Canada's website instead.
A Warning Shot for Other Points and Miles Tools
Seats.Aero is one of the most popular and helpful award search tools, but it's far from the only one. Point.Me, PointYeah, and Roame.Travel all help travelers find award availability. Each of these could become the target of legal action by Air Canada Aeroplan — especially if Air Canada is successful in its attempts to shut down Seats.Aero.
Instead of being able to prevail on legal matters, it seems Air Canada is trying to send a chilling message to these other award availability tools. By showing that it's ready to go forward with filing a lawsuit, Air Canada is likely trying to force these other tools to take cease and desist orders seriously.
In a recent Facebook Live, Mark Nasr (President of Aeroplan) complained about “unauthorized third parties that have…built tools to try to assist with award shopping or award pricing” and indicated that the airline would start taking legal action “to safeguard our partners, their technology, their costs, our own systems and infrastructure.”
Now, Air Canada is starting its campaign against these tools with a lawsuit against Seats.Aero seeking millions in damages. The question is: What's next? Will Air Canada succeed in bullying Seats.Aero to stop scrapping its website for award availability? If so, Air Canada will likely use that success to go after other award availability tools. Even if Air Canada fails legally, it may still go forward with taking similar actions against other tools — nitpicking small matters like the use of a logo here and a mention of Aeroplan there.
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