American Airlines (AA) back on Expedia

Early this year, Expedia removed all American Airlines (AA) fares from its site to protest AA yanking its fares off Orbitz. AA was trying to force Orbitz and other major ticket selling sites to use AA Direct Connect, a sales system that would give the AA more control over the sales.

However, Expedia announced yesterday that it would begin selling tickets American Airlines immediately after resolving an issue over how tickets are sold. As of now I can see AA fares on Expedia.

However, I could not get Expedia to mix and match AA with other carriers not available via aa.com. For example, a combination that yields cheap Asia tickets is on a combination of AA and Qatar Airways. This combination is not available via aa.com though I have booked this combination last year on expedia. Nevertheless, I could not get expedia to bring up this particular combination today.

What this means probably is that expedia is not pulling the information directly from the Global Distribution systems (GDS) but rather a hybrid of GDS and Direct Connect. Though this development is probably better than not having AA on expedia at all, it might not bode good news for the customers if all travel engines migrate towards Direct Connect.

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