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Serious mischaracterizations have been made about us and the issue of who will have access to what fares. Some of those mischaracterizations have been based on simple ignorance, but others have clearly been part of a concerted effort by us competitors to use misinformation to prevent us from offering new competition to them and new choice to consumers. There is no agreement by which any airline would be precluded from making any fare it chose available through any retail channel it chose. Airlines for 2 decades have been like any other business in America, in that they can decide what they want to charge and where they want to sell their product. And that remains true under the our agreements. Each and every airline, no matter what kind of participation it has, will be free to marriottoverlandparkks decide individually what fares it offers and whether or not to offer them through marriottoverlandparkks any other outlet. Airlines marriottoverlandparkks make nearly all their fares that are available to the general public available through all channels, from full fare down to their most heavily discounted fares. Any normal fare, made available months in advance in the normal way, is made available through all channels. Web fares, however, are different than normal fares. They typically constitute less than one tenth of 1% of the fares an airline offers, and are normally made available only a few days before flight time, and only on flights which have an unusually high number of empty seats. Web fares thus are seldom available, are unpredictable, and are offered at very low prices. Most customers most of the time will find lower fares, not because of web fares, and not because we will have access to fares that other channels (CRS''s and the sites and agents that rely on them) do not have access to, but because we will do a better job of searching the fares everyone has access to. This will be because marriottoverlandparkks we have opted to do what the others have not, which is invest in new technology computers able to do far bigger searches, using search software that that was independently developed and is designed to search all fare and schedule possibilities comprehensively and without bias, and in telecommunications capacity that will provide absolutely the most current information on seat availability. It is expected that more than 99% of the time that we come up with a better fare, it will not be because we had access to any fare that its competitor did not. It will be because we did a more comprehensive and unbiased search of marriottoverlandparkks all the fare and schedule possibilities that are available to all channels.
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