I respect that Stuart, as the ex-CMO of Expedia, has substantial knowledge of the airline industry. However, I have to respectfully disagree with his conclusions about wholesale/consolidator airfares. Stuart – I would be happy to speak with you directly to understand why we have such divergent views.

Consolidator contracts are mostly paper-based contracts that are negotiated between the consolidator and the airline company at the beginning of the year. In exchange for committing to a large block of inventory purchase, the airline company gives a deeply discounted price to the consolidator. Only the consolidator is allowed to issue tickets under that contract.

Typically a consolidator will support only one or two carriers on a route so they can deliver on their volume commitments. In other words, consolidators are like specialists who support certain airlines on specific routes. For that reason, consolidators do not service the general public as their offering is limited; in fact outside the travel industry very few, if any individuals even know who these wholesalers are.

The wholesale model is vastly different than the travel agency model, where the travel agent has to give unbiased information to the consumer and does not support one supplier over the other, which is precisely what the wholesaler does. Small travel agencies will buy from wholesalers and then markup the tickets before selling them to their customers. These transactions with the wholesaler are usually done over the phone.

The reason OTAs cannot be wholesalers is that they are expected to provide unbiased information on the whole market — not just their preferred carrier. Also, except for a small number of US carriers that can file some of the wholesale fares in the GDS, the bulk of the market is still off GDS and dreadfully paper-based.

Even the airlines that file some of their wholesale fares in the GDS still issue net fares contracts that are paper-based as the GDSs are incapable of handling all the 150+ variables that exist in a net fare contract. Also, since the tickets have to be issued by the wholesaler/consolidator, the OTAs would rather die before turning their client to one of the unknown wholesalers for ticketing.

I hope this information has helped clarify the facts about consolidator airfares.

And to correct the post prior to that from Astrid (and to make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to anyone else who happens to read all the comments above): cFare DOES MARK IT’S FARES UP !!!!!!!!! and, that’s not saying anything bad about cFares! just don’t get mislead into believing that in exchange for paying your $50 fee to enter their “select club” you get something at cost. In fact, like i mentioned above, cFares is making a substantial profit off the markup.

Yes, the big third party travel resellers do pull from GDSs, but not only from GDSs, and regardless it is child’s play to file consolidator fares in a GDSs and search those if that’s what you want to do. The third party guys are pulling fares from countless sources and applying smart math to mark them up and display them on the fly.

Not to mention that they typically represent such enormous volume to any international carrier from whatever gateway they are dealing with (e.g. ExpediOrbiLocity in the US are very important to, say, Air Canada because they can’t get that reach on their own, as would be the case for, say, United on the .co.uk versions of the same sites) that they can get great “consolidaotr” pricing.

Before you make a statement like that above, get your facts right.

• Stuart (fmr Expedia.com CMO)

As someone familiar with the travel industry, wholesaler airfares are not usually offered by the large on-line travel agencies – for a number of reasons, including the fact that this inventory is not tied to availability data in real-time, which is in the GDS (and fyi, is the system that Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia are plugged into, NOT the wholesaler systems). You need two “screens” – one GDS, one local to the wholesaler, to do this. It would take some significant technical wizardzy to match wholesale inventory with real-time availability information across the whole spectrum of wholesalers.

If cFares has centralized these fares into a single presentation offered directly to consumers with real availability, then that is a big plus to consumers as those fares can save them hundred of dollars over typical fares on other sites.

At first, I checked many other sites as well. Now, I don’t bother. cFares is a huge time saver!

Farecast just recently expanded to most US cities (they only had Boston and Seattle at first). I don’t see myself using any other service at all anymore.

What’s wrong with that?

For example, I pulled Nov 26-Dec 4 out of my ass from ORD-PVG. ITN’s booking engine says $914 on Asiana. Cfares says $905. Same itinerary. Expedia says $919 (with their $5 booking fee).

I fly around 125k miles a year. I don’t like using fare consolidators or anything along those lines. Generally, it’s not worth it. The prices are generally about the same (within a few bucks) and I’m able to get my assigned seat (which is important) on these flights. And my all-important miles.

I guess this site is ok if you really don’t care about how you get there.

and then if possible, how those 2 services provide any financial value to the consumer …

cFares is not just another travel vertical search engine. It makes two services available to consumers that, to our knowledge, previously came only via corporate travel agents and inhouse travel dep…