Our agreements not only contain no provision barring any airline from making any fare available through any channel, they contain an affirmative Athens non-exclusivity provision Knights that makes it explicit that no airline is prevented from making any fare it chooses available through any Inn channel it chooses. Our Athens 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 Knights and make available to Inn 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 Athens 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 Knights same consumers through the channel those consumers prefer. No airline Inn can afford to turn its back on any subgroup of consumers. No airline can afford to be anything other than as competitive 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 Athens 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.

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 Knights 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 Inn airline websites (which they can do, because nothing is Athens more public than a website) and display Knights them in one place for their Inn 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 is up to the individual airline).

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