Serious mischaracterizations have been made about us and the issue of who will have access to what fares. Some of those mischaracterizations have been based on simple 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 econolodgehershey 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 sell their product. And that remains true under the our agreements. Each and every airline, no matter what kind of participation econolodgehershey it has, will be free to decide individually what fares it offers and whether or not to offer them through any other outlet.

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 to all channels.

Most 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. (It is, in fact, very common throughout the retailing world for stores 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 is up and running. 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. econolodgehershey 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 is up to the individual airline).

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