Remember when travel portals were first launched on the web? At that time the industry was seeking a way to get direct access to clients thereby bypassing travel agency service providers and all those nasty commissions they used to make on airline bookings.
Well now there's a move afoot to bypass the online portals with the objective being to commoditize the delivery of pricing information for the benefit of individual travelers. New software tools are available to ease the pain of checking prices for plane tickets, hotel stays and car rentals.
The newswires have been active relative to this issue lately:
AOL Offers New Travel Service
TravelAxe Provides New Travel Tools Geared for the Individual Traveler
While AOL has yet to establish some method of making money from the service, time and business volume will obviously tell.
TravelAxe, on the other hand provides a Windows-based programm to help people gather the information and tabulate it in a safe, familiar environment. The program is intuitive, easy to install and trouble free for me, up to this point. They have apparently established agreements with the major portals with regard to commissions for them which makes their product available free of charge as well as being free of usage fees to the end user.
The industry is discovering that the internet travel sector, while being the second most lucrative internet market vertical aside from online pornograrphy, is an elusive prey with many twists to anticipate before its ultimate capture.
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