Battle Escalates Between Airlines and Online Agents

Ponca City writes "The Epoch Times reports that online travel booking giant Expedia has removed American Airlines from its travel website over disagreements with American's fee structure in the latest incident in an escalating battle between airlines and online travel agents. Although American gets roughly two-thirds of its revenues from third-party travel agents like Expedia, American has been looking for online agents to cut their fees as one way to lower fares — something that Expedia was not prepared to do. Expedia released a statement that American's action 'will result in higher costs and reduced transparency for consumers, making it difficult to compare ticket prices and options with offerings by other airlines,' while American urged customers to book directly on American's website for the lowest prices. Meanwhile Google is waiting in the wings with its recent proposal to purchase ITA Software, the developer of the Internet's leading technology to compare flights fares. 'Though 49 percent of travelers purchase travel online, it is still time consuming and slow to search for travel options online,' says a statement from Google, defending the ITA acquisition which is being opposed by Microsoft on anti-trust grounds. 'We plan to work with ITA to create a new, easier way for users to find better flight information online.'"

On the bright side...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I sense the emergence of some job openings for programmers and software engineers skilled in the art of swiftly building, and iterating as needed, scraper agents to aggregate numerical and geographic data from multiple multi-step forms driven websites...

Don't take The Epoch Times too seriously

[Rix]

It's the propaganda wing of the Falun Gong cult.

Re:Welcome to the Airline Industry Expedia / Orbit

[Moraelin]

My mother selected 3 of the 4 hotels for my honeymoon, the other coming from the NY times travel section. Guess which one was the dump with paper thin walls and crappy beds?

Yeah, my mom can be a practical joker like that too ;)

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[Man On Pink Corner]

I just flew on American Friday night from Honolulu to Chicago; 45 minutes out of Hawaii, the captain turned the "Fasten Seats Belts" light back on - at the first excuse for a mild bump - and then left it on uninterrupted for the next 7.5+ HOURS - in smooth. clear air - all the way until we landed - 36 hours later

Are you sure your plane didn't crash on an uncharted island with a temporal anomaly?

Re:Expedia vs Kayak

[Anonymous Coward]

Comment brought to you by: KAYAK.COM!! Thanks for shopping SLASHDOT DOT ORG!!

Re:Low-cost airlines vs. traditional

[SanityInAnarchy]

You mean they put a dozen clones of you on Southwest flights and wait till one of you reports back that you made it alive?

Are you sure your name isn't BadAnalogyGuy?