Users of TripIt's premium service can no longer use TripIt Pro to track their Southwest Rapid Rewards after the airline sent a cease and desist letter to the itinerary management service.
Southwest believes when TripIt Pro users uploaded their Rapid Rewards details to TripIt, it violated Southwest.com's terms and conditions, which prohibit "third party websites [from] scraping or using our data," says airline spokeswoman Brandy King.
Among prohibited activities, Southwest, the largest domestic airline in the U.S., states:
You may not copy, display, distribute, download, license, modify, publish, re-post, reproduce, reuse, sell, transmit, use to create a derivative work, or otherwise use the content of this Site for public or commercial purposes without our express written permission. Nothing on this Site shall be construed to confer any grant or license of any intellectual property rights, whether by estoppel, by implication, or otherwise.
TripIt spokeswoman Nancy Ramamurthi says TripIt "respects the decisions" Southwest makes for its business, and TripIt "immediately complied with their request."
As with other airline and hotel loyalty programs, user information about Southwest's Rapid Rewards program was appearing in TripIt's Web and mobile channels, and Southwest objected to these displays, Ramamurthi says.
The prohibition does not impact TripIt users -- whether they use the free service or TripIt Pro -- when they forward their Southwest itinerary confirmations to TripIt, Ramamurthi says.
Ramamurthi adds that it's TripIt's "understanding that they [Southwest] were or are pursuing all mileage point programs" and that TripIt was not singled out.
TripIt enables users to track loyalty rewards information from more than three dozen airlines and hotels -- but Southwest is no longer among them.
Southwest's King didn't immediately have available a list of other companies who may have received similar cease and desist letters.
In the past, Southwest has aggressively gone after online travel agencies and metasearch companies when it believed the airline's intellectual property was being used without authorization.
TechDirt says it became aware of the Southwest-TripIt issue when a reader forwarded an email about the issue from TripIt.