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 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, and are offered at very low prices.

It is absolutely clear that airlines do not have the ability to drive consumers to channels which the airlines, rather than consumers, prefer. If one or more airlines attempted to do so, the others would increase their market share by appealing to those same consumers through the channel those consumers prefer. No airline can afford to turn its back on any subgroup of consumers. No airline 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 ultimately out of the fact that the airline business is a very low margin business - any airline that 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.

Most customers most of the time will find lower fares, not because of web fares, and not because we will have access to fares that other channels (CRS''s and the sites and agents that rely on them) do not have access to, but because we will do a better job of searching the fares everyone has access to. This will be because we have opted to do what the others have not, which is invest in new technology computers able to do far bigger searches, using search software that that was independently developed and is designed to search all fare and schedule possibilities comprehensively and without bias, and in telecommunications capacity that will provide absolutely the most current information on seat availability. It is expected that more than 99% of the time that we come up with a better fare, it will not be because we had access to any fare that its competitor did not. It will be because we did a more comprehensive and unbiased search of all the fare and schedule possibilities that are available washington to all channels.

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