Unfortunately, we have learned that Air Canada filed a lawsuit against us today in the US District Court for Delaware to try and shut down Seats.aero’s support for Air Canada. We attempted to work with Air Canada several times, including offering to change how our scraping worked, but they refused to work with us and filed this lawsuit without any further notice. This is a hostile move against all award travel tools.
Air Canada is alleging that we are retrieving availability too quickly for Star Alliance to handle, but we retrieve availability from other Star Alliance airlines at the same rate, and they appear to have no IT issues coming from it and have never complained to us. We have built our systems to protect the airlines from excessive load, as we search Air Canada for availability at a fixed rate and have controls in place to rate limit all requests sent to Air Canada's systems. When our users view Aeroplan results on Seats.aero, they no longer have to go run the same search on Aeroplan's site, saving them resources.
Air Canada is alleging our searches caused them issues but do not acknowledge other points search sites and malicious third-parties that are known to scrape Air Canada as well, and they don't attempt to distinguish our searches from them at all. The complaint doesn't quantify our searches compared to anyone else. Additionally, Air Canada tries to paint us as malicious hackers despite us having previously worked with them to resolve cybersecurity issues in their own systems.
We are disappointed in this outcome but we are determined to fight this unfair attempt to shut down Seats.aero’s support for Air Canada. If you are a Seats.aero user but not a Pro user, we encourage becoming one if you can to help us fight this lawsuit, which will take a lot of resources for our small company. Thanks for your support during this time.