
Orbitz told to stop selling American Airlines tickets  - px
http://chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/12/court-orders-orbitz-to-stop-selling-americans-tickets.html
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hugh3
I can't say I care much. I care more about the fact that Southwest doesn't
show up on orbitz, meaning that if I'm flying somewhere I'll check orbitz and
Southwest separately.

But American Airlines, unlike Southwest, is _very_ low on my list of preferred
airlines, so I'm not going to go check their site just in case it happens to
be cheaper.

Still, they know they're losing a certain amount of business, and they've
taken this risk for a bigger goal.

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jrockway
On the other hand, I really like American, and only use the comparison sites
to make sure I'm not getting _too_ bad of a deal. AA out of Chicago is almost
always cheaper than everything else.

(Only time AA was too expensive was when I was flying to Singapore. ORD-NRT-
SIN was $11,000, ORD-LAX-HKG-SIN on Cathay was $9000. Yes, I even do price
comparisons when it's not my money. And yes, the ORD-LAX segment was on AA :)

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hugh3
If those are the prices then you're obviously not an economy-class flyer, so
AA may indeed work out nicely for you. :)

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jrockway
I do fly economy when I am paying for my own travel, and I still find it
acceptable. Not non-US airline acceptable, but US acceptable :)

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marssaxman
I guess I won't be flying American Airlines anymore - I'm certainly not going
to go searching through every single airline's web site individually. If
they're not on the aggregator, they might as well not exist.

The only way this might work is if American stopped competing based on price
and started focusing on the quality of the experience. If AA were consistently
less annoying than other airlines, it might be worth looking them up
individually.

~~~
hugh3
Well as I understand it their long-term goal is to get back onto the
aggregators, but with the aggregators getting their information direct from AA
instead of a third party (fourth party, really -- it's a middleman to access
the middleman) to whom AA has to pay money. This sounds like a fairly legit
sort of goal.

I wish AA would stop sucking too, but it's not easy to take a huge company
with sucky infrastructure and a sucky culture and make it stop sucking,
especially when it's not clear that every million dollars you spend on sucking
less will actually result in a million dollars of extra profit. It's usually
easier just to start a new, not-sucky airline. Hello Virgin America!

~~~
marssaxman
So the consumer-facing aggregators are not talking to the airlines, but to an
older generation of presumably travel-agent-facing aggregators? If that's
what's going on then this seems like a pretty sensible move for AA in the long
run.

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joshwa
Two points:

One: I haven't really used the aggregators in a while (and even then it's only
Kayak). I use ITA matrix to find sane flights at good prices. The only
downside is that for peak travel periods their availability data can be out of
date, but I think that affects all the aggregators.

Two: For all the folks who complain about airlines being dinosaurs who can't
innovate, here you have an example of a legacy carrier attempting to innovate
against Sabre/Amadeus/TravelPort by bypassing the middlemen and going straight
to the consumer-facing aggregators. True, it's not operational improvements,
but it is an example of shaking up the way airlines do business.

interesting reading:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_distribution_sys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_distribution_systems#Major_systems)

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gyardley
Bah. Since I'm platinum on American but not 100% insensitive to price, this is
going to force me (and I suspect all their other frequent fliers) to switch to
whatever ticket aggregator _does_ carry American.

What a pain, but due to the miles / upgrades / etc. it likely won't cost them
any of their repeat customers.

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borism
why use Orbitz in the first place? It seemed very terribly done few times I
searched with it. I like Expedia, even though it is not significantly better.

But this year I used Kayak, Expedia and ITA's Matrix only to search for
flights. I then booked directly with the airlines.

~~~
hugh3
I also tend to use orbitz to find the cheapest fare and then book with the
airlines. Orbitz, expedia, kayak, they're all about the same as far as I'm
concerned.

And for hotels I'm mostly using hotwire at the moment, in combination with
betterbidding which has so far had 100% accuracy in predicting which hotel I'm
going to get... or at least correctly predicted that I'm going to get one of
two equally palatable alternatives (Airport Sheraton vs Airport Hilton? Who
cares?)

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weel
After using Hipmunk and ITA Matrix, I won't go back to using Orbitz or Expedia
for searching fares. They're still convenient for actually booking things, but
that's it.

I've lately had to book some flights between SFO and IAD on very short notice,
and with Hipmunk for searching and Orbitz for booking, I can go from deciding
that I should get a plane ticket to having it ordered in 10 minutes. For more
complex searches, though, ITA Matrix still beats Hipmunk.

~~~
hugh3
OK, I'd never heard of hipmunk, but now I've had a look I'm pretty much
converted. That's a far better interface than anything else I've seen.

~~~
kn0thing
\o/ Word of mouth really does work. Thanks, weel! And don't be a stranger,
hugh3, drop us a note with any & all feedback (contact@hipmunk.com) or say hi
in Olark chat right on hipmunk.com

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mbreese
I wonder what this means for "Orbitz for Business" customers. At my
university, if we need to travel for a conference, the only way to get the
school to prepay for the flight is to use Orbitz for Business. Otherwise we
have to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed.

And I'm sure there are companies out there that have exclusive booking
arrangements with Orbitz. All of that means a loss of customers for AA.

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jacobolus
Will American still show up at <http://matrix.itasoftware.com/> ? If so, it’s
easy enough to go to American’s site when they’re substantially cheaper than
another airline.

