Orbitz told to stop selling American Airlines tickets | Hacker News Reader

Orbitz told to stop selling American Airlines tickets

chicagobreakingbusiness.com

26 pointspx27 comments

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.

I doubt very much that Southwest will ever allow anyone to sell their tickets anywhere but their own site.

What's their logic there?

From what I've heard: They don't want third-parties to control access to their customer base. They don't want to pay third party sites bounties for customer acquisition. And they don't want to support some specific companies because of their connections to their competitors. (Orbitz was actually created by Continental, Delta, Northwest, et al to compete with Travelocity despite anti-trust concerns.)

And Travelocity is owned by Sabre, which in turn was created by American. A little bit of history there.

I've always assumed that there was some kind of fee that needed paying to get your airline listed on Orbitz.

Does Kayak have any plans to integrate Southwest and other low cost carriers into their results. There are tools like Skyscanner in Europe that aggregate low cost carriers the way Kayak does for airline websites.

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 :)

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

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 :)

If you like flying on 40 year old deathtraps, American is great.

I love the MD-80s.

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.

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!

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.

My experience is mostly with American, but while AA can be annoying (though not when you are in paid First/Business and have status), aren't Delta, United, and US Air significantly worse? That's the consensus I get from FlyerTalk. (Continental seems better than AA, but not out of Chicago.)

In the non-pointy end of the plane, I find United slightly less annoying than American... though the only reason I can think of is that American has a really annoying tune which they play with their safety announcements, whereas United has some nice Gershwin. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but... I'm over-sensitive to annoying music.

My personal order of preference is Virgin, Southwest, drive, train, ride donkey, United, American, walk.

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...

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.

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.

Habit. I know how Orbitz's interface works already and can go through it on autopilot - I don't have to poke around with something new.

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?)

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.

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.

\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

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.

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.

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