With more and more airlines beginning to cut the middlemen will this mean a cheaper ticket or are they just trying to make a bigger profit?
Recently there is a growing trend within the travel industry for airlines to cut out the agency middlemen and sell tickets directly from the site.
Other travel sites are up in arms about the fact that the airlines are now hoarding all the flights to themselves and not sharing with the agencies. What people don't seem to be up in arms about is what is going to happen to the price of flights?
Surely if a middleman is cut out and their commission abandoned this would lead to lower prices? Well we know that airlines are staffed by magical leprechauns and puppies but I don't know how friendly they arePuppies have teeth.
We have to think that the airlines are a bunch glutinous capitalists (they wouldn't own a fleet of planes otherwise) and if they see a profit margin increase then they will not lower their prices, they will more than likely line their pockets with it.
Even the most eccentric airline owners (Branson) would not turn down cold hard cash for the sake of making his customers a little bit happy.
The latest airline to take this route is American Airlines. So the best thing to do would be to conduct an experiment. To see whether the prices of flights to Miami drop over the next few months as the airline starts to save money by cutting out sites such as Expedia and Orbitz.
I predict that the results will only yield one result. It is one that we as the submissive public already know and are willing to accept. The airlines will not drop their prices and people will be made to pay the commission that doesn't exist!