Travel

#Online travel agencies return fire in war with Delta

photo by Ron Cogswell via Flickr

As travel websites offering cheap deals on airline tickets proliferate on the Internet, airlines are looking for more ways to lessen the sites impact. For Delta Airlines, the answer is completely withdrawing its data about flights, tickets and pricing from several third-party booking sites.

By forcing more customers to look for tickets on its own website, where they often spend more money, Delta boosts its profits and saves on booking fees to the agents. Furthermore, without comparison prices alongside, customers won’t know whether they are getting ripped off. Now online agencies are beginning to fight back against what they see is an unfair practice by Delta and other airlines. In a report by Travel Technology Association (Travel Tech), several travel websites — including TripAdvisor, CheapOair, and Hipmunk — have banded together to voice their complaints against the policy, and Travel Tech has sent a copy to the Department of Transportation for review.

Destinations, also unhappy with Delta’s decision, are rooting for the websites, as they represent a big source of revenue for them. Removing the flight connections from the travel sites means fewer people are booking tickets, a major hit considering 44 percent of 766 million travelers who flew on U.S. airlines last year booked tickets through online travel agencies like Orbitz, Expedia, and TripAdvisor.

Although Delta isn’t saying much about the fight, it clearly thinks it’s perfectly within its rights to control its own data, telling the Wall Street Journal it “reserves the right to determine who it does business with, and where and how its information is displayed.”

In a further dig of the aggrieved websites, the airline said that it’s focusing on agencies that are “responsive and adaptable.” Whatever the truth is, the policy is an undeniable show of Delta’s power in the market.