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It is absolutely clear that airlines do not have the ability to drive Sea consumers to channels which the airlines, rather than consumers, View prefer. Hotel and Sea If one or more airlines attempted to do so, the others would increase their market share by appealing to those same View consumers through the channel those consumers Hotel prefer. No airline can afford to turn its back on any subgroup of consumers. No airline Sea can afford to be anything other than as competitive and as attractive as it can possibly be through each channel to the consumers that prefer that channel. This is a reality that grows View ultimately out of the fact that the airline business is a very low margin business - any Hotel airline that Sea lost even a small group of passengers would be at risk of swinging from profitable to money-losing in an instant. Airlines scrap for every last passenger because they have to. 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 in advance in the normal View 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 Hotel airline offers, and are normally made available only a few days before Sea flight time, and only on flights which have an unusually high number of empty seats. Web fares thus are seldom available, are unpredictable, and are offered at very low prices. Most View and Hotel airlines today choose to make web fares available only on their own websites, because these fares are so low it would be uneconomic to offer them through the higher cost channels. Sea (It is, in fact, very common throughout View the retailing world for stores Hotel 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 agents and the websites that rely on CRS''s is strictly an individual airline decision, and will remain so once Orbitz Sea is View and Hotel up and running. Several third party websites (such as intellitrip.com) today take web fares from Sea various airline View websites (which they can do, because nothing is more public than a website) and display them in one place for their customers. And of course travel agents can book web fares off an airline''s website for a Hotel customer if they wish (although whether they get a commission on that booking is up to the individual airline).
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