Serious mischaracterizations have been made about us and the issue of who will econo lodge have access to what fares. some of those mischaracterizations have been based on simple lodge ignorance, but others have 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 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 want to seymour 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 econo to offer them through any other outlet.

most airlines today choose to make web fares available only on their own websites, because these fares lodge are so low it would be uneconomic to offer them through the higher cost channels. (it is, in fact, very common throughout the retailing world for stores seymour 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 econo 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 lodge is up and running. several third party websites (such seymour as intellitrip.com) today take web fares from various airline websites (which econo they can lodge 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 if they wish (although whether they get a commission on that booking seymour is up to the individual airline).

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