Originally Posted by
checkerboard
Is the root cause that airlines really watch this forum like hawks, and by sharing info here, we're alerting them to opportunities they can extinguish? Are we just over-paranoid that this is the case - since the pricing we're discussing is anyway well-known to the airlines themselves? Who knows.
Well I for one would welcome a free source for this information; subscribing to a service like EF (or somehow getting access to a GDS where the fares are also listed) is annoying as hell, and a free source would be a great boon. Oneworld used to have a table on its website showing prices, but they pulled that due to the "all-in" rules I mentioned earlier.
I don't know that Oneworld watches this board like a hawk; if they did they'd surely know by now what we think of their POS online booking tool.
But they plainly DO react to information that is spread on this board (and other places) evidence the short-lived MRU, KRT and CAI AONEx and DONEx fares in recent years. In those cases I'm sure it wasn't them being talked about on FT, it was the flood of bookings that resulted. I once visited with one of the terrific people at Mindpearl in Cape Town (back in the boom boom South Africa xONEx days) who said that most of the people she saw buying RTWs ex-SA had some contact with Flyertalk, so I don't doubt for a minute the role this site might play.