Back in early 2010 ANA changed their website a bit, removing access to partner award searches for members without points in the ANA Mileage Club program. There is a workaround available by searching first for an ANA-operated route and then choosing the "Use Star Alliance Member Airlines" button but that’s a bit annoying. When the change first happened I made a GreaseMonkey script to similarly work around the issue. At some point, however, that stopped working and I got caught up in other stuff and fixing it kept getting pushed off. Well, it finally bubbled back to the top of the task list; a new script is now available!
Here’s what the site looks like without the script installed:
And here’s what it looks like with the script enabled:
As you can see, I altered the text a bit so you can see clearly that the script is enabled. Should the page change again hopefully I won’t be so derelict in getting an update published. I’ve also updated the name of the script and reset the version number to 1.0.0. You can remove the older script if it is still installed; it will not see future updates.
Also, for users of the Chrome browser, apparently Google decided that anyone who wants to publish scripts for their browser has to use their store. I’m not inherently opposed to that interface but I’m a bit miffed that they are charging $5 to folks, even those who want to give away their content, to register with the store. I’m not particularly inclined to give them the $5 so that means Chrome users have an extra step in the install process; the instructions are here. If that’s too difficult for y’all I’ll suck it up and give google the cash but I’d rather not.
I’ve tested on a few systems and browser versions and things are looking pretty good so far. If anyone runs into trouble let me know.
Related Posts:
- A bit of a reprieve on the Star Alliance reward search problem
- Bad news for Star Alliance reward searches
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Thanks a lot Seth!
Brilliant work…as always.
Does ANA tool show all Singapore availability that’s shared with the alliance? It’s the one airline where I have a hard time finding them on United or Aeroplan with any consistency.
ANA has historically had a “hard block” on premium cabins for certain aircraft types operated by SQ, even though SQ will occasionally (though rarely) make that inventory available. The ANA site says:
I don’t have any reason to believe that they are not still enforcing this policy.
Thanks Seth, good info. I guess finding SQ availability comes down to using their own website and calling United to see if they’ll book it. Even Expertflyer doesn’t have them.
Can you tell me how to run the script in Safari? Sorry but I have little coding knowledge.
Hey there, tck. Here’s a link on how to get GreaseMonkey scripts supported in Safari: http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/11/14/how-to-run-greasemonkey-scripts-in-safari/. At step 5 in the process come back here and pick this script rather than the one they suggest.
I can’t find a library folder. Can it be called something else?
I’m guessing it could be but I really have no idea. I’m not much of a MacOS person. Sorry.
Dunno if GreaseKit (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/20718/greasekit) might be more useful.
Do you know anything about ninja kit. It was suggested on the grease monkey download page as better. How would I run a script using that.
The extension must have access to all websites data? What’s that about? (using Chrome)
I am getting a run time error, tried installing both in chrome and IE.
Instaling what? And what is giving the runtime error? Chrome will warn you against installing it directly from my site and require you to download it and install manually. And I don’t think IE supports GreaseMonkey. But neither should present anything resembling a runtime error.
It keeps telling me “document” is undefined and won’t work. Grr
I just tested it again, Crystal, and it is working for me. At what stage in the process are you getting the error??
I may be late to the party here – easiest way (2 steps) to get it to work in Chrome that I know of are just to install the plugin ‘Tampermonkey’ from http://code.google.com/p/tampermonkey/ (first link on this page)
Then return here and Seth’s link for the script and accept it.
Worked great for me thanks!
It wooorks! I have Chrome