Delta forces Award Wallet to cease and desist.

And Delta is off the service.

Per the admin: http://awardwallet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2697&sid=9de871b9d731b775c027f989b0441253

The link has a PDF for the cease and desist. I searched but couldn't find this news anywhere. If I'm placing this in the incorrect forum my apologies.

 

I guess I'm going to have to rename my entry to Omega SkyPesos then.

 

I'm sorry, did you already post this? I searched "Delta Award Wallet" and nothing came up. My bad.

 

Oh, no - sorry. I guess it was a bad joke on my part. I meant with AwardWallet, if the program isn't supported and you have to create your own entry, then you get to rename your program entry to whatever you want. That was my choice. My others (literally) are:

Bratwurst Airlines - LOVE rewards (WN)
DisAdvantage Airline Rewards - (AA)
and now Omega SkyPesos

 

Good choice.

 

I'm assuming UsingMiles won't be far behind...

But when AA started this whole mess, the general consensus was that it wouldn't be long before the rest of the airlines started taking notice. Hopefully this is the end, but I would imagine that the rest of them couldn't be far behind.

 

Ugh. Bad news.

 

LAME.

Welcome to Delta: where the points are made up, and customer service/convenience doesn't matter.

 

Wow...way to hate on your customers.

 

It's a race to the bottom

 

Seems like there's a war on scraping nowadays.

But I guess it's easier/cheaper (for Delta anyway) to have the lawyer fire up a letter than messing around with their site. They could have obviously hidden the balance behind some obscure page or used flash so it couldn't be accessed by a scraping process or whatever, but they still achieved the intended effect.

Now usingmiles has been down for me for a good portion of the day, probably related to the GoDaddy goodness we've all been seeing today (ugh) but my guess would be that they dropped it as well -- assuming Delta went after all aggregator websites.

 

I am not a lawyer, but that seems to be one nasty C&D letter. What a bunch of ...

Govern yourselves accordingly, y'all!

 

Well from the looks of it, they sent previous C&D letters and had some kind of correspondence with AW, which was followed (according to the letter) by an increase in traffic, so I'm guessing the guy had to get nasty and put deadlines on the thing.

You can see this in the "demand" for retention of electronic records at the bottom... they figured that AW could always say that there was no previous communication received so if it came to lawsuits they would have subpoenaed the electronic records / computers / whatever and gone with some crazy Forensics Kung Fu to retrieve the data, had it been deleted.

Not a fun business to be in, that's for sure.

 

The only upside in all of this is that Skypesos aren't really worth tracking in the first place. Not nearly as big a loss as American, or as big a loss as United would be.

Ironically Award Wallet just signed up its 100,000th member. That's a lot of members to kick in gut, though I suppose if they're just playing a numbers game, they probably have 50 million in the database..

 

It was more than pesos, AW tracked vouchers and companion certificates along with their expiration dates. It was so easy to access compared to Delta.com's method of having to dig deep within your account.

 

The legal nastygram mentions one prior cease and desist letter two weeks ago, followed by an email from Award Wallet (not reproduced).

The notion that there was a material increase in traffic seems on face silly, pure legal posturing, I mean why would that make any sense at all? Other than perhaps that we're now in September and August is slow internet-wide.

Again, just legal posturing and an attempt to sound ReallyScary(tm).

 

What next? A change to the award chart without any notice...or maybe take away the ability to change award reservations close to travel...Oh, wait a minute.

Ugh.

 

Absolutely, but effective nevertheless... who has the time/inclination to fight that kind of crap when Delta has more money and more lawyers than you do?

If anything, turn them into the bad guy and let the infamous "public opinion" start some kind of internet nerd rage, but at the end of the day it will go nowhere just like when AA did this.

It sucks -- albeit less than other programs which are far, far more valuable to me than Delta -- but what sucks more is that it sets the precedence, and you have to wonder how long before (other programs that I don't wanna even mention) go after them too.

 

More AW customers => more traffic

How many new customers did AW get through MP Premium Membership, for example?

(for the record, I am not an AW user)

Can they now also subpoena everyone's award wallet data?

 

I am not an AW customer, but if I was one, I'd send a polite email to the lawyer's email address listed at the top of the C&D letter asking why they are denying my authorized agent to access my account with my authorization and on my behalf, thus making my business dealings with Delta Airlines more difficult.

 

This really stinks.....

 

I don't think they would be able to handle the volume. It looks like a 3 person firm according to their website. I am sure they are strong litigators based on some of their victories listed, but am surprised that Delta isn't using a "larger" firm.

 

That would be... sad.

 

The Forensics Kung Fu actually isn't all that hard once you get the subpoena in place.

Correct. And when you have the "guru" Randy Petersen supporting this tremendously customer-unfriendly behavior it isn't hard to see why the airlines think they can get away with it pretty much unscathed.

Seriously, it is slightly annoying for the several thousand AW members. SkyMiles has tens of millions of members who have never heard of AwardWallet and who have no idea what any of this means. They couldn't care less.

 

No way to overemphasize how bad I feel for AwardWallet. Guy comes up with a great idea, people love that it is so useful, gets to make some money on that great idea and then.....

Yes, it's more work but we'll get over it. And as Gary said, Delta sucks anyway (my phrasing!). I would love to see an article in the Sunday NY Times Travel Section about this that would make those airlines look as evil as they are!