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Old 13th March 2010 | 13:25
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Hartington
 
Joined: Apr 2002
Posts: 1,235
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From: UK
HT - that's not the way consolidators work; at least not in the UK. They may well contract to sell a number of tickets but they then sell from normal availability. With the sophitication of airline yield control systems these days the airline can closely control how many seats are sold not only in each bucket but who to. It's quite possible for an airline to say "I'll sell up n tickets in class x to agent 1, n-10 in class x to agent 2 and zero in class x to agent 3 on a speicific flight". Using that kind of control they can feed space out to consolidators as and when it suits their yield management.

A2 - that sounds to me like Holiday Genie don't have a del and are simply selling the normal fare and then, because they don't have a deal and agents don't earn commission (generally) from airlines these days adding a fee to cover their costs.

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There's another, more general point in all this. Where an airline has good brand recognition in a market it has less need to use consolidators than an airline with little brand recognition or (dare I say it) negative recognition. Why would Air Canada sell seats cheaply via a consolidator when it can probably sell them through its' own website at a higher fare?
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