A user-friendly search engine with the most current information ... the engine is easy to use, and the results are ranked with the lowest fares first. Travel sites are proliferating on the Web like strip malls in suburbia, but there''s one whose name you should remember. Expected aol to reinvent the online fare-finding wheel when it launches in June. It aims to search every available flight combination for travelers, giving them the choice of cut-rate fares, fewest legs on a trip and most convenient departure times. This could radically alter an industry in which customers surf numerous sites before making a purchase.

Most airlines today choose to make web fares available only on their own websites, because these fares are so low it would be uneconomic to offer them through the higher cost channels. (It is, in fact, very common throughout the retailing world for stores or catalogs to also have a website, and for that website to offer a few prices that are below the prices charged for the same goods in the store or the catalog.) However whether an airline chooses to make its web fares available through CRS''s to travel agents and the websites that rely on CRS''s is strictly an individual airline decision, and will remain so once Orbitz is up and running. Several third party websites (such as intellitrip.com) today take web fares from various airline websites (which they can do, because nothing is more public than a website) and display them in one place for their customers. And of course travel agents can book web fares off an airline''s website for a customer if they wish (although whether they get a commission on that booking is up to the individual airline).

Our agreements not only contain no provision barring any airline from making any fare available through any channel, they contain an affirmative non-exclusivity provision that makes it explicit that no airline is prevented from making any fare it chooses available through any channel it chooses. Our agreement contains a non-discrimination clause by which those airlines that will receive the indirect discount on the CRS booking fee agree in return to make available on any fare they publish and make available to the general public through any other channel. But that of course does not preclude them from offering any fare through any other channel.