Online Travel Has Many Problems, and Everyone’s to Blame
Skift Take
How soon will it be before U.S. regulators take up the issue of the pricing control wielded by the four largest U.S. airlines? On the other hand, the U.S. Department of Justice helped to create this mess.
A fascinating new study commissioned by the Travel Technology Association details how Delta Air Lines over the last few years has adopted a Southwest-like approach and has removed its fares and schedules from dozens of smallish online travel sites but also from bigger players such as TripAdvisor, CheapOair, Hipmunk, Vegas.com and Travelzoo's Fly.com, among others.
Delta's goal, along with parallel actions by other U.S. major carriers to limit distribution in a variety of sometimes-subtle ways to online travel agency sites and travel comparison sites such as Kayak and Skyscanner, is to keep fares artificially high by making it much more difficult for consumers to shop around and scrutinize competitors' fares side by side.
That's one of the conclusions of the report, Benefits of Preserving Consumers' Ability to Compare Airline Fares, which was authored by Scott Morton, a Yale professor who served from 2011 to 2012 as deputy assistant attorney general for economics in the Antitrust
