Bits: MyFlights app forced to close, £5 UberPOOL trips, Avios hotel deals

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• Waribai says:

  1 Jun1 June 04:36

  I can still open the app and all my flights are showing. Is it new flights which cannot be added?

  • Joe Chapman says:

    1 Jun1 June 04:42

    It also won’t track any changes made tp existing bookings anymore

    • Genghis says:

      1 Jun1 June 06:42

      It tracked a change made to a booking of mine yesterday evening. So is My Flights down from today?

      • Rob says:

        1 Jun1 June 09:02

        It might be an airline using Sabre and not Amadeus.

  • John says:

    1 Jun1 June 10:15

    I tried to add a new booking yesterday and it wouldn’t let me. This explains it!

• McPepper says:

  1 Jun1 June 05:58

  If you select a trip in the app and then click on check for updates, you’ll get a message saying trip not found.

  If Amadeus had any new sense they’d allow data to be accessed for a fee: I’d have happily paid a nominal sum.

• Gabriel says:

  1 Jun1 June 06:07

  The bad news with UberPool is that if nobody is heading in your direction the driver still needs to wait 10-15 minutes to see if such a request appears.

  • Marwan says:

    1 Jun1 June 06:54

    Is that new? Certainly was not been my experience when I used it a couple of weeks ago. We ended up not sharing with anyone.

  • Danksy says:

    1 Jun1 June 07:26

    Not my experience when I used it in LA… For a miserly $12 I got from Hollywood to LAX for 2 of us! Compare this to the $65 I spent in a yellow cab from the airport to the same place in Hollywood!

  • Matt says:

    1 Jun1 June 12:30

    Not true at all.. how would that be a good use of the drivers time?

• Ralph says:

  1 Jun1 June 06:13

  Check my trip was updated a week or so ago.

  The problem with the other app was the lack of an Android version ignoring the largest market share. So like many others couldn’t use it.

  Hopefully check my trip will now improve, although not keen on having to set an unlock code for my phone.

  • DV says:

    1 Jun1 June 18:07

    Stop whinging and tell your Mum to buy you an iPhone next time.

• Rob says:

  1 Jun1 June 06:15

  I’ve been using the uberPool in Shanghai (called People’s Uber+), but it’s matching system very rarely works well. If it matches you with another rider you normally end up with a huge detour to pick-up/drop-off that rider, so it can be a lot of extra time for your journey even though uber state it should only mean an extra 5 minutes or so on your journey. I once ended with a 2.5hr trip to the airport which normally takes 40 minutes.

  It’s good of course when it doesn’t match so you just get the discount, so it’s good if you like to gamble! Would be interested to know if the know if the system’s more efficient in London.

  • Alex says:

    1 Jun1 June 11:11

    It’s not, my normal 15 minute Uber home from Marble Arch to Westminster last night took 40 minutes thanks to trying pool. Never again.

  • Matt says:

    1 Jun1 June 12:26

    I suspect that the reason Uber is offering £5 UberPOOL rides is to gather data to better optimise the matching algorithm for London. Once fully functional, the discount applied is based on the probability of you getting a match, so if you find that your fare is significantly cheaper than UberX it means you have a pretty high chance of picking up another passenger.

    I’ve used UberPOOL a decent amount in both Chicago and San Francisco, and it has certainly got better over time. For example, they have recently blocked UberPOOL from taking you off a major highway to find a match, lowering the chances of a long detour on journeys to the airport.

• Ben says:

  1 Jun1 June 06:21

  That is a real shame about My Flights, it was genuinely so useful. Surprised that they hadn’t secured some longer-term deal for access to the data though.

• Nick says:

  1 Jun1 June 06:33

  Devestated that My Flights HD has been forced to cease operations by Amadeus. It was an excellent app contains important information such as Seat Number, Aircraft Type, Frquent Flyer Details etc and crucially it sent notifications of changes to the flight.

  Check My Trip is hopeless in comparison. In one fell swoop, Amadeus has dealt a blow to its end users by reducing the data available to travelers.

  My I suggest that Head for Points readers go to the App Store and give it 1 star and a negative review. Let’s target 100 negative reviews by end of 1st June.

  • ee says:

    1 Jun1 June 06:46

    +1

    After making our last minute Qatar booking FCO-DOH-KUL the first thing I did was try and add to MyFlights. When it failed I thought there was a problem with the booking because my payment declined 3 times before Post Office unblocked the card and it went through. Sad times!

    • Danny says:

      1 Jun1 June 07:36

      This is a dreadful loss, especially for anyone with bookings on airlines that allow waitlistings (e.g. Cathay). MyFlights was great at letting you know as soon as a waitlist had been confirmed, something CheckMyTrip doesn’t do. Anyone know of any other apps with this functionality?

  • Jeff says:

    1 Jun1 June 11:09

    Maybe worth writing to Amadeus as well; I did this when they tried to block MyFlights in 2010 and Amadeus did relent. The CEO, Luis Maroto’s email is lmaroto@amadeus.com

    It seems amazing (and very anti-competition) that a technology company like Amadeus can’t provide a better app. They are only used to dealing with other businesses not passengers which is why they are trying to interfere with an excellent app.

    • Daniel says:

      2 Jun2 June 11:22

      Very disappointing news; My Flights saved myself and my colleagues from nights at airports, bad seats, missing appointments, missing chances to rebook, missing flights and essentially keeping customers happy.

      I just emailed the German MD and the CEO.

      ..”And please consider how this affects your brand and reputation and whether not sharing information and providing interfaces to popular systems has ever been a successful strategy for an IT company.”..

      • Lady London says:

        3 Jun3 June 00:58

        +1,000. As an individual who doesn’t travel as much as they would like, MyFlights saved me from everything on your list at least once Daniel. And on a relatively low number of flights. MyFlights is that useful.

        Reminds me a bit of how the American airlines and British Airways, so far as I can tell, did everything they could to kill off Freddie Laker, who was offering a cheaper service that customers wanted that the legacy airlines couldn’t be bothered to provide to customers themselves in an equivalent price/quality ratio. No, they preferred to kill off the good guy instead.

        I said it before and here it comes again. Shame on you, Amadeus.

• Dave says:

  1 Jun1 June 06:44

  AwardWallet can work as an alternative to MyFlightsApp – I once got an email notification from that when my seat had changed. I guess it found that out by updating my BAEC account in the background and the information had changed in MMB.

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