Lowest Air Tickets

Finding The Lowest Air Tickets Around

Would travel agents decide to write lowest air tickets around ABC Airlines to encourage them not to make a deal with Ticketron? The realities of working in this marketplace are such that if you wish to stay in business as an agent, most all of whom are very small businesses, you must keep your client happy. You've got to keep your principal happy, too, your airline.

But you have to satisfy your client, and I don't know anyone -- I can't imagine anyone who would tolerate an agent saying, "You can't fly on this carrier though the service and the price is the best value for you because I am mad at them today." The travel agent's lifeblood is his repeat business. It's the same in all business, and I just don't think that's a realistic possibility for lowest air tickets.

I would not be surprised if that occurred in some cases. I also know of some cases to the contrary, where travel agents were actually trying to induce people as much as possible to go on Braniff. But let us suppose that they did, that they did write away from Braniff in the closing days. You have to ask the question, why would they do that?

In that kind of situation, what was the agent's interest? And I suggest that the agent's interest was that he held the public's money, and there is no distribution system that public policy ought to promote into existence that would behave any differently. A travel agent is going to advise his consumers, his clients, when he has the possibility before him of giving that client's money to an airline that may not be around in a week to perform the transportation.

The articles in the newspapers, articles on television, the talk shows, the Braniff situation was very widely known, and travel agents would not responsibly do that unless the consumer said, "I don't care. I'm willing to take the chance."

It also ought to be noted here, I think, that travel agents have gone quite far in other areas to try to eliminate situations which would induce people to wish to stay away from a carrier that's in financial trouble. The best example being the default protection plan which the CAB recently approved with our support. Is that going to continue, or now that it's official and everything, are they going to start coming out?