Air Canada Files Lawsuit Against Seats.Aero

Air Canada Files Lawsuit Against Seats.Aero

Air Canada has filed a lawsuit in US District Court for the District of Delaware against Seats.Aero for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Air Canada Group brings this action claiming that Mr. Ian Carroll who runs the popular award search website, created a for-profit website and app that use substantial amounts of data unlawfully scraped from the Air Canada Group’s website and computer systems.

The lawsuit says that this is in “direct violation of the Air Canada Group’s web terms and conditions”. The lawsuit says that Carroll uses bots to continuously search for and harvest data from the Air Canada Group’s website and database. His intrusions are “frequent and rapacious, causing multiple levels of harm”. Air Canada claims that these actions put an immense strain on the its computer infrastructure and impacting customer experience.

Air Canada also claims that Seats.Aero uses its federally registered trademarks and logo to mislead people into believing that the site, app, and activities are connected with and/or approved by the real Air Canada Group and lending an air of legitimacy to the site and app.

Air Canada has attempted to stop Seats.Aero from scraping its data via a number of technological blocking measures. However, Mr. Carroll has been able to thwart those attempts “while boasting about his exploits and circumvention online.”

Seats.Aero’s Version

The website posted an explanation of the events on reddit. They say they “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.”

Seats.Aero denies they are retrieving availability too quickly, because they retrieve availability from other Star Alliance airlines at the same rate, and they appear to have no IT issues as a result. “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.”

The reddit post also claims that Seats.Aero staff has worked with Air Canada in the past to resolve cybersecurity issues in their own systems, so it’s strange hem to paint the site negatively as a bunch of hackers.