Cheap Air Ticket

The Rise And Fall Of Air Ticket Prices

For the last three years the Civil Aeronautics Board has done a study. We've collected over 50,000 pages of facts and information, and it all tied into the deregulation act because in 1978 the airlines were deregulated.

In other words, the airlines could operate in a way that was free of government regulation. And we said at that time the production of the product would be deregulated, and now, through the competitive marketing study on cheap air ticket, or this recent case we've just determined last week, we said there should be competition among the marketing of the cheap air ticket as well as the production of the airline seats.

It's one of those cases where the Congress said you can have competition and you should have it. And we studied the situation and we determined that it was anticompetitive to have all exclusive travel agents being the only ones to book airline tickets. And what this does is open it up to a better idea. It's not necessarily who it's going to help, but it allows competition and competition is what made America great. It's sort of like the light bulb.

For example, when they first built the incandescent light bulb, if the law was passed that nobody could do anything to change any new developments, then you'd still have an incandescent light bulb. But because it was open to competition you came along with neon bulbs, and today you have saver bulbs that save a lot of light. And as a result, you have a better system of lighting. And the same thing can happen to the travel agency. You can have new ideas in the sale of airline tickets, and those tickets can't be sold unless the airlines approve of it.

The real thing on that is the fact no ticket will be sold by any other source unless the airlines authorize the sale of that ticket. All we did was open the door and say, hey, if the airline desires some other method of selling their tickets, they can do so. That's part of the free enterprise system, and it opens it up.

No longer will the travel agents have a monopoly on it. Now, this also opens the doors for travel agents, and if travel agents think they can develop better ways of selling tickets, they're free to do so as well.