Our agreements not only contain no provision barring any airline from making any fare available through any channel, they contain an affirmative non-exclusivity provision that makes it explicit that no airline is prevented from making any fare it chooses available through any channel it chooses. 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 channel.

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 mountaintopinn 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.

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 mountaintopinn 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 mountaintopinn 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 mountaintopinn 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 it has, will be free to decide individually what fares it offers and whether or not to offer them through any other outlet.

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