Kim Gandy is an experienced traveler, and she’d like to think she wouldn’t fall for a scam. But when she tried to book a rental car through Hotwire recently, she thinks she may have been duped.
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Maybe you’ve heard about the little dust-up between American Airlines and several online travel agencies, including Orbitz and Expedia.
Maybe you’ve noticed that when you go fare-shopping on those travel sites, you aren’t offered any American flights.
Maybe you’ve said to yourself, “So what?”
“It’s really an inside baseball kind of story,” admits William Swelbar, a research engineer in MIT’s International Center for Air Transportation.
But not so fast. Yes, the intramural spat between airlines and travel agencies may seem irrelevant, but there’s a lot at stake. The future of how you buy airline tickets could hang in the balance.
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