There have been a number of discussions on this boards concerning Orbitz vs. AA.com, including this good one:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum71/HTML/006843.html

The previous consensus on the reasons underlying fare differences between Orbitz and AA.com was that technical differences in the search capabilities of both the interface and underlying GDS were the likely culprit. Until today, I believed that this or synchronization delays between GDses and the airline were the likely cause (if such a problem exists).

Today, I have concluded that it is likely that AA is loading fares into Worldspan that it is not loading into Sabre or other GDS.

For several days I've been using a variety of sites to look for a cheap 7 day advance sat night stay ticket from DFW to EWR on AA, CO, or NW. The fares have been around $2000 on AA and CO and $800 (bizflex at work!) on NW (incidentally, UA had $200 fares but I didn't want to fly UA).

Today I logged onto orbitz and found plenty of $210 fares on AA with a 7 day advance purchase and satruday night stay. I then tried to find these fares on AA.com. I had no luck. I tried a fare lookup on travelocity (Sabre) and couldn't find the fare. Then I decided to call AA.com support. They were also unable to find the fare, so I asked them if AA had Oribtz only fares. After a few seconds on hold, she came back and told me yes.

I purchased my ticket on orbitz and came to FT to research my finding, which prompted me to do a little more digging. So I decided to use some other systems to attempt to find the low fare. ITN (which I believe uses either Amadeus or Galileo/Apollo) did not have the fare, however Expedia did. This surprised me as the above referenced post said that Orbitz uses Amadeus while Expedia uses Worldspan. I decied to call Oribtz and verify their GDS. I simply asked one of their reservation agents which CRS they use and the answer was Worldspan. Then I noticed the fare basis in question: LE7QSPN . It seems to be too much of a coincidence that a fare that I can find only in Worldspan ends in the designation "SPN." This leads me to believe that AA is loading fares into Worldspan that they are not loading into other systems (something I wasn't aware was even possible).

The next question is why? Worldspan is owned by DL, NW, and AA (b/c of TWA). Is this an attempt to bolster Worldspan against Galileo and Amadeus? Does AA believe that with Sabre the dominant system used by travel agencies in the US, that Worldspan, which powers Orbitz and Expedia, two of the largest online agencies has a much higher percentage of price sensitive customers than Sabre? Is this some strange attempt to recreate some of the asymetry of information that internet booking engines have almost eliminated? Is this an attempt to judge the state of the market without making the fares available to everyone (akin to test marketing)?

Maybe they just like to screw with us.
What is really annoying about this is that it appears to be a violation of AA's customer service policy which states that AA agents will give you the lowest published fare available for which you qualify, other than Internet only fares. If this fare were available only on orbitz, even if it were not available on AA.com, that might still come under the internet only fare. However, it would appear that this fare may be available from any Worldspan agency. In this case, if I can buy it through an agency, AA is definately in violation of their customer policy.


[This message has been edited by Dudster (edited 01-31-2002).]