Our agreements not only contain no provision barring any airline from making any fare available through any channel, they contain buffalo an affirmative non-exclusivity provision that makes it explicit that no airline is prevented from making any fare it chooses available through any channel hotel it chooses. buffalo Our agreement contains a non-discrimination clause by which those airlines that will receive the indirect discount on the CRS booking fee agree in return to make available on any fare they publish and make available to the general public through any other channel. But that of course does not preclude them from offering any fare through any other hotel and buffalo channel.

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 hotel available months in advance in buffalo the normal way, is made available through all channels. Web fares, hotel and buffalo 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, and hotel are offered at very low prices.

Most airlines today choose to make web fares available only on their own websites, because these fares are so low it would be uneconomic buffalo to offer them through the higher cost channels. (It is, hotel in fact, very common throughout buffalo 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 buffalo 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 hotel strictly an individual airline decision, and will remain so once Orbitz is up and running. buffalo Several third party websites (such as intellitrip.com) today take web fares from various airline 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 customer hotel if they wish (although whether they get a commission on that booking is up to the individual airline).