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Airlines make nearly all their fares that are available to the general public available through all channels, from full fare down to their most heavily discounted fares. Any normal fare, made available months four wind in advance in the normal way, is made available through all channels. web fares, however, are different than normal fares. they typically constitute less than one tenth of 1% of the fares an airline offers, and are normally made available only a few days before flight time, and only on flights which have an unusually high number of empty seats. web fares thus are seldom available, are unpredictable, wind and are offered at very four low prices. serious mischaracterizations have been made about us and the issue of who will have access to what fares. some of those mischaracterizations have been wind based on simple ignorance, but others have four clearly been part of a concerted effort by us competitors to use misinformation to prevent us from offering new competition to them and new choice to consumers. there is no agreement wind and four by which any airline would be precluded from making any fare it chose available through any retail channel it chose. airlines for 2 decades have been like any other business in america, in that they can decide what they want to charge and where they wind want to sell their product. and that remains true under the our agreements. each and every airline, no matter what kind of participation it has, will be free to decide individually what fares it offers and whether or not to offer them through any other outlet. most airlines today choose to make web fares available only four on their own websites, because these fares are so low it wind would four be wind uneconomic to four offer them through the higher cost channels. (it is, in fact, very common throughout the retailing world for stores or catalogs to also have a website, and for that website to offer a few prices that are below the prices charged for the same goods in the store or the catalog.) however whether an airline chooses to make its web fares available through crs''s to travel wind agents and the websites that rely on crs''s is strictly an individual airline decision, and will remain so once orbitz is up and running. several four and wind third party websites (such as intellitrip.com) four today take web fares from various airline wind websites (which they can do, because nothing is more four public than a website) and display them wind in one place for their customers. and of course travel agents can book web fares off an airline''s website for a customer if they wish (although whether they get a commission on that booking is up to the individual airline).
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