Star Alliance Airlines Launch Offensive Against Third-Party Award Search Websites

This week, it appears that a few Star Alliance member airlines have launched an offensive against third-party websites that scrape loyalty program websites for award availability and sell the aggregated data to users. 

This can make it a lot more challenging for savvy travellers to search for award seats going forward, and it’s also a part of the much broader issue of limited award availability across the board that’s been affecting the industry over the past year or so. 

Let’s take a look at everything that’s happened so far.

What Brings Us Here Today

There’s been a lot of chatter about award availability in the Miles & Points world lately, particularly in the context of the misuse of loyalty programs by bad-faith actors.

Last week, our friend Anshul at Points Miles and Bling hosted a livestream with Mark Nasr and Scott O’Leary, two of Aeroplan’s executives.

During the conversation, the executives provided a lot of insight into Air Canada and Aeroplan, including aircraft cabin refurbishments, lounges, the recent targeted status extension promotion, and more. If you didn’t tune in, and if you’re interested in any of these topics, I’d encourage you to give it a watch. 

The issue of partner award availability was brought up, and discussed in detail, beginning at around 1 hour and 10 minutes into the call.

We recently published our thoughts on what’s happening with Aeroplan partner award availability, and we gained some more insight into Aeroplan’s behind-the-scenes approach during the call.

Aeroplan’s leadership summarized five issues that have been affecting partner award availability on Aeroplan as of late, outlined as follows:

• Some partners have shifted their business strategies since partnering with Aeroplan (e.g., pursuing membership in alliances that aren’t Star Alliance)
• Some partners have ongoing IT issues, including antiquated technology, which sometimes results in the fallout of award availability
• Fraud and program misuse
• Third-party websites that scrape the Aeroplan website for award availability
• Phantom award availability (i.e., even if awards show as available on other platforms, in reality, they aren’t actually available at all)

Aeroplan’s leadership went on to explain that the sum of these issues has resulted in Aeroplan not being able to offer some awards…