One of the risks associated with building award search tools based on publicly available data sources is that the people providing that data will decide they no longer want to share it. Last week the website I’ve used for several years now as the underlying source of the Single Bucket Inventory tool as well as for award inventory on more than a dozen airlines changed their website. They cut off access to the inventory. I spent a few days trying to find a suitable replacement – both on their site and elsewhere – and I’ve come up empty. Game over.
This source was one of the only easily accessible, reliable outlets for award space on a whole bunch of airlines and I know that a lot of users are going to be negatively impacted by the loss of this tool. Alas, there’s not much I can do as I no longer have access to the data to share. I wish it were different but such is the way things go some times.
I’ll be updating the site shortly to remove those pages. In the mean time you can expect to see the “fail kale” error if you run a search.
Sorry.
The following searches are the ones being lost (like I said, a lot of them):
- Aegean Airlines (Business & Economy Class)
- Aeroflot (Business & Economy Class)
- Aerolineas Argentinas (Economy Class)
- Air China (Business & Economy Class)
- Aeromexico (Business Class; travel after 1 Oct 2013)
- Azul (Economy Class)
- China Southern Airlines (First, Business & Economy Class)
- China Eastern Airlines (Business & Economy Class)
- Czech Airlines (Business & Economy Class)
- El Al (First, Business & Economy Class)
- El Al Upgrades (First & Business Class)
- Finnair (Economy Class)
- Germanwings (Economy & Business “SMART” Class)
- Gulf Air (First, Business & Economy Class)
- Hawaiian Airlines (First & Economy Class partner awards)
- JetBlue (Economy Class partner awards)
- Korean Air (First & Business Class)
- Korean Air Upgrades (First & Business Class)
- Luxair (Business & Economy Class)
- Shanghai Airlines (First, Business & Economy Class)
- Tarom (Business & Economy Class)
- Vietnam Airlnes (Business & Economy Class)
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Do you think it might be a good idea to share which tools have been impacted? :/
Thanks so much for the time and effort building the wandr.me search tools! I’ve found them so valuable. This is a bummer. A big loss to us award hunters…
I echo this –
Thanks so much for the time and effort building the wandr.me search tools! I’ve found them so valuable.
While I have access to expertlfyer and did not use the tools much, it was always a great resource to point people to.
I particularly found the expert mode on steroids very useful on CO (and the new UA)
Sad to see several of these go. Manual searches are not fun.
Thank you for all your efforts!
The single-bucket inventory search seems to be having problems, too. I’ve only tried short-term US searches personally, but consistent fail kale.
And worse of all the BA Captcha …..
can’t you get most of this data from flightstats?
Yes and no.
FlightStats uses a different GDS back-end from the old source so the data is slightly different. Also, because it is a different feed different fare buckets are listed. This means that not all the award buckets are included in that feed.
For revenue bucket tracking (and non-AA metal) FlightStats is a good free alternative.