View from the Wing Archives.
Air Canada says Seats.aero’s automated award-search scraping is computer fraud. Seats.aero says Air Canada is trying to block a useful award tool and shut down competition — and now the fight is expanding from website terms and trademarks into antitrust, tortious interference, and unfair competition claims.
Air Canada has sued award search website Seats.Aero in Delaware court for pulling award availability from its website. They claim (1) trademark infringement for use of its marks, and (2) violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for accessing its systems without authorization.
There may be a real problem for Air Canada here, but their legal claims appear weak – and certainly bad from a public policy standpoint. They have deeper pockets, though, and sometimes that’s enough to prevail.
American Airlines is suing The Points Guy over its app that tracks account balances, scraping data from the AA.com website.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has found for the second time that web scraping of publicly accessible data doesn’t violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
A software engineer who had flown IndiGo from Patna to Bangalore picked up the wrong bag, and the person whose bag looked like his picked up the wrong one as well. Despite several attempts to contact the airline IndiGo wouldn’t give him contact information to reach out to the other passenger in order to swap luggage. And, despite its claims to the contrary, they never reached out to the other passenger either.
So the passenger took matters into their own hands.
Kiwi.com did seem pretty blatant in what it was doing, but banning the publication of flight information seems both overbroad and prior restraint on free speech. I regularly publish “Southwest flight [and] fare information” on this site. They are even barred from “committing any other acts in violation of Southwests Terms & Conditions.”
The Kiwi.com case is about the power of website terms and conditions, and a company to control information it publishes publicly on the internet.
Kiwi.com did seem pretty blatant in what it was doing, but banning the publication of flight information seems both overbroad and prior restraint on free speech. I regularly publish “Southwest flight [and] fare information” on this site. They are even barred from “committing any other acts in violation of Southwests Terms & Conditions.”
The Kiwi.com case is about the power of website terms and conditions, and a company to control information it publishes publicly on the internet.
Southwest doesn’t want people automatically checking in 24 hours out, because it might cut into Early Bird check-in revenue. They don’t want people automatically checking price changes, because consumers might save money. They want self-service to be hard. And it’s both fine and reasonable to want those things. It’s neither fine nor reasonable for the government to subsidize those things by threatening innovators who want to use publicly available information.
Southwest Airlines is customer-friendly in many ways, from no change fees to not hitting customers with checked bag fees. Their employees are friendly and actually seem to like their jobs.
There’s really just one part of the company that seems to hate people, and that’s legal. They’ve been more aggressive than most airlines in going after websites that pull data from Southwest.com and make it more useful to customers.
Three years ago American Airlines introduced pre-order meals. Premium cabin customers can pre-select their meal choice either online or over the phone within 30 days of (and up to 24 hours prior to) travel.
In mid-September American took this functionality down off their website. But it turns out there’s a website ‘hack’ to let you pre-order your meal.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
