Buh bye, United "Expert Mode"

Posted by Seth Miller on September 7, 2012 under frequent flyer, points | 26 Comments to Read

For folks who enjoy seeing the details behind flight inventory availability the United Airlines "expert mode" option was one of the better options available. Any customer could see all inventory buckets, including awards and upgrades, with a reasonably simple search. Emphasis on "could."

The carrier is disabling that feature as part of their site updates this weekend.

The move takes away a great benefit to customers in order to allow them to better support their internal operations; apparently discrepancies in displayed data were causing overwhelming call volumes and put their reservations agents in a position where they were unable to effectively manage passenger expectations.

The data was available on the site for roughly the past 14 months; prior to that it was available on the United site though a bit more difficult to get at. With this change it is disappearing completely.

Obviously fixing the data discrepancies would have been a more customer-friendly solution, and hopefully that will happen soon so that the information can be returned to the website. But for the time being, this is a dark day for frequent fliers.

For folks who have been using the GreaseMonkey script I created to highlight award inventory this change will render it useless. Nothing I can do about that if they aren’t publishing the data. Sorry. :(

Related Posts:

Tags: , , , , , ,

  1. Steven said,

    I am not happy. I never called about what I saw on the fare class availability, but I did really appreciate having it there as a means for guessing at my upgrade odds, and making decisions as to which flights to purchase or use RPUs on.

  2. Matthew said,

    Will this mean the end to EF displaying the space as well?

  3. Explore said,

    I have the same question as Matthew.

  4. Seth said,

    I certainly won’t pretend to speak for the folks at ExpertFlyer, but based on this move I would be quite surprised if they are able to continue displaying the data. I suppose we’ll have to wait to see what they say in the coming hours/days. I’ve reached out to them so hopefully they’ll have a comment soon enough.

  5. Gene said,

    This sucks, but since you can (presumably) still search for awards and upgrades at United.com, it’s not the end of the world.

  6. mike said,

    you think KVS as well? not seeing R space would be a terrible thing for all UA elites….

  7. al613 said,

    Its bad for same day confirmed, because the site often was not able to offer you routing available, but you could constract it yourself and then call. This way LGA-CLE-ORD could turn into LGA-IAH-ORD with the help of ICC :)

  8. palefire said,

    Taking away the ability to see R/RN space is presumably a lot easier than fixing the upgrade system.

  9. Tom said,

    So another example of how United’s technology infrastructure is a trainwreck. So do they fix it? Of course not, they pull it. This is beyond frustrating and it’s getting very old.

  10. Kris Ziel said,

    It seems pretty simple to me, make it an opt-in option like the old United site and have a little disclaimer that says displayed inventory is only valid on that routing. Problem solved.

  11. Michael R. said,

    The merger is a failure. Except this time I mean it :(

  12. Alex L said,

    I frequently used the fare inventories in order to see which flights I could SDC before the 24 hour window. Maybe I should just call United every hour asking for the fare inventory.

  13. Joe Nevin said,

    Dumb decision from a customer perspective

  14. MilesFromBlighty said,

    If you don’t live in the US you cannot search for upgrades on the UA site.

  15. KL said,

    But I thought everything CO dba UA did was great and that Smisek was wonderful!

  16. Carl said,

    I am hugely disappointed in this change. Expertflyer has already posted they are impacted too

    It was very important to me to be able to see R inventory before purchasing flights.

  17. A pair of United MileagePlus contests | PointsHoarder said,

    [...] pair of United MileagePlus contests United may be screwing over some customers by taking away the detailed inventory data from their website, but that hasn’t stopped them from offering up miles in a couple contests this week. United [...]

  18. United Takes Away Customer Ability to View Upgrade Inventory Online (Website ‘Expert Mode’) - View from the Wing said,

    [...] Aramean says the reason the information was pulled is because of “discrepancies in displayed data” [...]

  19. MechTeach said,

    I just checked for flights on the UA site and saw that the full fare class viewing was gone. No problem, I thought, I’ll just pop over to Seth’s site – I’m sure he has already found the magic bullet that will fix this. Uh oh…now this is a dark day!

  20. Charles said,

    FKM … “More changes you’ll like”

    Seriously, what does this accomplish but MORE calls to find inventory….

  21. warreng24 said,

    The ExpertFlyer.com master thread on FlyerTalk, see post 754. EF says that Award and Upgrade inventory will be removed from EF. However, EF will continue to display the revenue fare buckets.

    The KVS Availability Tool thread is a bit more cryptic. See post 5098. KVS says that UA Upgrade Availability display changes from numeric to [+/-] format. I guess this means that KVS will be the only tool left that will let us know if there’s upgrade/reward avaibility?

    I’ve never used either tool, but I guess I’ll try out KVS.

  22. Easing the United upgrade search a wee bit - The Wandering Aramean said,

    [...] to the rather customer-unfriendly move this weekend by United Airlines it is rather more difficult to identify flights with upgrade inventory [...]

  23. palefire said,

    The decision to jump to AA for the time being is looking better and better. Ultimately I’d rather be with UA and *A, but until the United IT and customer service stop being a disaster, and until the fleet is up-to-date (read: has in-flight Wifi), I’m pretty comfortable with having made that choice.

  24. Sometimes the lowest fare really isn’t, but why? - The Wandering Aramean said,

    [...] to have no basis in reason. Makes being an airline customer all that much more challenging. And since United pulled inventory data from their website this weekend it also means that double-checking a fare like this is even harder. After all, how would I know [...]

  25. And now United’s "Expert Mode" is coming back - The Wandering Aramean said,

    [...] the plus side, it seems that United Airlines is being true to their word that a replacement for the recently departed "Expert Mode" functionality will be forthcoming. The company indicated today that they expect to offer the now missing [...]

  26. United cuts off points aggregation sites - The Wandering Aramean said,

    [...] time United has taken such actions in the face of 3rd party harvesting sites using their data. Remember when "expert mode" went away? Data scraping was one of the justifications used then, too. That said, the option is back and all [...]

    27. Add A Comment

home top