Air Canada is suing frequent flyer miles award search service seats.aero, with Air Canada arguing that the site shouldn’t be allowed to scrape its website for award availability. They argued doing so violates their website’s terms, violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and that seats.aero violated their trademark by displaying their logo along with search results.
Seats.aero won an early victory when Air Canada failed to get a preliminary injunction – when they failed to show a a clear breach of Aeroplan terms or imminent irreparable harm. But the case has been going on now for almost three years.
Now the award search site is trying to fight back with counterclaims – of antitrust, tortious interference, and unfair competition – and Air Canada is trying to keep those arguments out, saying that they are coming too late in the process.
Seats.aero is now being run by Chris Lopinto, who founded Expert Flyer.
Why Air Canada Is Suing To Stop Award Search
Air Canada and Aeroplan sued Localhost LLC, owner of Seats.aero, in Delaware (where they’re incorporated) on October 19, 2023, to stp the service from harvesting large quantities of Aeroplan award data using bots. They alleged both screen scraping and API scraping, with the scraped data used to populate their website including their paid commercial subscription product.
- scraping allegedly burdened Air Canada servers and caused website outages
- Aeroplan search traffic triggered a large numbers of downstream requests to Star Alliance and partner airline systems ‘straining partner relationships’
- Seats.aero used Air Canada trademarks and logos which Air Canada characterizes as infringement, dilution, and false advertising.
Aeroplan’s Terms of Use prohibit automated scripts, robots, crawlers, screen scrapers, data mining, derivative works, disproportionate burden on infrastructure, and circumvention of blocking measures. Seats.aero argues, however, that:
- the data is publicly available
- the API is not the same as the Air Canada “website” covered by the site’s terms
- The Amadeus reservation system operates the API or at least complicates Air Canada’s theory of who owns the degraded servers
- Seats.aero rate-limits requests and isn’t actually that burdensome, and Air Canada did not prove that Seats.aero caused outages
- In fact, users viewing Aeroplan data on Seats.aero can reduce direct searches on the Aeroplan site
- There’s no consumer confusion putting an Aeroplan logo next to Air Canada flight search results.
Air Canada said Seats.aero sometimes displayed up to 265,552 Aeroplan-available routes, suggestig they were making that many API shopping requests over two days. But that’s only around one per second, which shouldn’t – on their own – burden a modern commercial scale system.
Where This Case Stands
There’s been some suggestion that the case could settle, but it hasn’t. Document production and depositions were complete last summer. Settlement talks reached an impasse on February 17, 2026. Seats.aero brought in new counsel.
Now Seats.aero is trying to countersue for antitrust, tortious interference, and unfair competition. Aeroplan is limiting the market for award search, and interfering with Seats.aero’s business relationships. But this still comes down to whether Air Canada is in the wrong or Seats.aero is.
Air Canada argues that since the case was filed in 2023, the original pleading amendment deadline was a year later, and discovery was largely complete by last summer, this just pushes out discovery and more depositions, lengthening the case.
Seats.aero hasn’t filed its answer on this yeat, but their motion to add these counterclaims was filed by the amended schedule’s deadline, and they arise from the same dispute. I have to think they’re allowed some counterclaims, even if the antitrust arguments are excluded or some of the claims are stayed.
Why This Matters
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been… abused to extremes, in the past allowing the effective criminalization of violations of a website’s terms and conditions. However in recent years more egregious readings of the law have been reined in.
The Supreme Court narrowed it saying that there’s no violation merely by accessing information one is allowed to access, but for an improper purpose or in violation of use policy. Air Canada has to argue that Seats.aero was accessing something off-limits or continuing access after authorization was revoked, rather than just violating Aeroplan’s terms.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit says screen scraping a publicly accessible site isn’t illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
That’s not controlling here, but it is the best reading and one that matters for the world. Prosecutors have turned mass downloading of academic articles from a university network into a federal felony warranting decades of prison. And they’ve tried to make violation of MySpace terms and conditions a crime. So I reflexively revolt against Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims.
The trademark claim is one that’s been successful for instance when American Airlines sued Skiplagged. And seats.Aero has used the Air Canada Aeroplan name and Air Canada logo on its site when displaying results. There’s zero chance of consumer confusion. Nobody thinks Seats.aero is somehow Aeroplan, or that Air Canada endorses. And displaying the mark doesn’t in any way make it less valuable.
A few years ago I did infosec work with a travel portal. They were getting crushed by robots looking for booking arbitrage, pricing errors, etc.
It was usually a couple of IPs making thousands upon thousands of search requests for 1 passenger, two passengers, today, tomorrow, next week, for the top 20 airports on the planet flying to a fistful of destinations.
The “cost” to the travel portal was that when _search_ volume went up and _booking_ volume remained constant, the incremental cost of the searches went up.
With normal human activity, the ratio of searches to booking is remarkably consistent.
But add in a couple of bots working at machine speed and the price per search goes up quickly.
You named only seats.aero, but pointsyeah (and possibly more) is also doing the same thing. Are they collectively counter suing AC?
Cowtool doesn’t have a resource to fight, so it’s shut down its search function and laying low?
With Mark Nasr such a loyalty aware executive I wonder why they are the only airline taking this stance, and only this particular site
@Maverick
I’m going to bet that other sites pay for usage. Many companies charge for API access and are happy to provide it as long as it’s paid. Likely the scraping is what’s really being litigated here.
This case seems similar to the Google Books case a couple of decades ago. Authors sued Google claiming that displaying their books in search infringed on their copyright, but Google successfully argued that its search function would actually HELP the authors rather than hurt them financially by making their books easier to find.
In a similar way, Air Canada should rejoice that seats.aero makes its award seats easier to find. The fact that it is instead suing suggests that it doesn’t actually want its saver award seats to be found! Airlines want to market that they have saver availability as part of the marketing funnel, but don’t actually want it to get redeemed at scale (similar to how the credit card companies want “breakage” on their monthly credits). Tools like seats.aero reduce points breakage by helping travelers actually redeem for the rare “marketing” saver award price. This makes it harder for airlines to get away with stealth points devaluations without getting caught by customers. Being compared to other points programs on identical routes also makes it harder to get away with a “SkyPesos” strategy long term (just like how the rise of OTAs in the 2000s made cash fare comparisons easier and forced airlines to compete more on price).
Gary – you are over your skis here. Regardless of what you think is “fair” or “reasonable” US IP law favors Air Canada. Frankly the award sites all work in a gray area from a legal standpoint and numerous airlines could take similar action if they wanted.
As far as the counter claim of tortious interference- what contractual agreement is Air Canada causing harm. Also restraint of trade has no standing if the actions aren’t legal under Copyright or Patent law. Sorry but this is an area I know very well.
@Retired Gambler – Respectfully, you aren’t reading what I wrote if you made that comment.
In fact you write “Also restraint of trade has no standing if the actions aren’t legal under Copyright or Patent law” as if to rebut me when I literally write “this still comes down to whether Air Canada is in the wrong or Seats.aero is.” In other words, whether Seats.aero is acting legally in the first place. So you’re just reiterating the same point I made.
I never offered the suggestion that Seats.aero has a strong counterclaim, only that part of it could be allowed to proceed. I said that airlines have had luck with trademark, and that Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims have gotten tougher – as they should. When specifically there do you disagree with? Cut out the strawmen.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is only reasonably relevant in response to DDS attacks. In the area of airline reservation systems Seats.Aero (or any other tracking service) does not even register enough hits to be worth enhancing the server CPUs or RAM for.
The one question you did not address: Why would Air Canada want to spend millions preventing this? The answer is that they basically run sophisticated price discrimination (much like a manufacturer who prices differently in different countries). Seats.Aero is an arbitration force, correcting price discrepancies. AC could stop them instantly by dynamically pricing Aeroplan miles as a cash proxy. But they don’t want to. They make too much money under the present arrangement.
@Steven: “(just like how the rise of OTAs in the 2000s made cash fare comparisons easier and forced airlines to compete more on price).” That was the 1978 ADA.
Just got rid of my last aeroplan mile. Air Canada vs The People’s Right to Know is what this case should have been called. Also, I love all those “upgrade available” indicators which, when you click on them, reveal that only 2% of the journey is upgraded. Eh?
No love for AC, but making it more difficult to find award availability is a good thing to me.
I feel that the elephant in the room is being ignored: If Seats.Aero (I’m a premium member myself) shows all the space, and particularly if AI comes into play, there may just be no awards left in desirable circumstances for the rest of us.
It will be interesting to see what the courts decide on this. It does not come down to the decision of lawyers. However, the way AI is advancing, ways to get AI to return information on how to use the award system may make all of this moot.
@maverick, cowtool shut down because the owner has tight connections with AC management, and would never dare to upset them.
The sad part here is that seats.aero really makes it easy to see how pathetic Aeroplan has become with some routes literally having zero seats available no matter the date. And how many partners remain blocked
I wanted to start similar site but I’m not sure now, we still need one big api with all airlines selling their data there and then we can all pay for the API, I even bought domain but its for sale now if someone wants it: awardflightspro.com
@Mantis — Classic… pulling the ladder up behind you… *facepalm*