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(c) Elliott Publishing.

That Southwest Feeling
Kirby's Korner · July 23, 1999

I didn't realize how dependent I am on personal computers and the Internet until I lost the use of both. And lack of access is the reason I haven't been writing for this Web site recently.

My small region of the world lost power one Sunday morning a few weeks ago. I'm sure it was a local problem, and the electric company had someone out looking at the transformer immediately. Unfortunately, we had a summer thunder boomer late that afternoon, causing wider outages and moving the power worker from my region to somewhere else.

It was three days before I got power back -- this in a region less than two miles from the nation's capital. I then had phone problems for a few days. And once all troubles external to my house were fixed, I realized my computer's memory had been fried.

There's nothing more useless than trying to run Windows 98 on a machine with no memory.

Things are almost back to normal; I'm still having e-mail problems, but I can get to the Web and Usenet. And these missives can begin again -- so long as I update the site myself and don't try to send the article to someone else to do the updating. We'll see how that goes.

Last time we left hanging the question of why bookings for Southwest Airlines and some other low-fare airlines aren't available on all sites that take bookings. Blame that on the airlines.

Southwest has opted to make its flights available on only one of the airline Global Distribution Systems, Sabre. Any travel agency -- brick and mortar or virtual -- that uses another GDS needs to do what you and I do if we want to fly Southwest: call the airline directly.

This isn't unprecedented. One of the changes that ValuJet made when it bought and then changed its name to AirTran was to join the GDS community. This move surprised some agents I know, but it was welcome. I'm not sure how any airline makes it without GDS distribution to travel agencies, but Southwest seems to do fine with its limited system.

Online agencies have another problem with Southwest. Other airlines have drastically cut commissions to agents for flights booked through the Internet and similar means. Southwest has gone further, not paying any commission for such bookings. Online agencies lose money on every Southwest ticket they sell -- it costs something to process the tickets.

One correspondent pointed out to me that Continental Airlines and Microsoft's MSN Expedia send out tickets purchased through the Web from nearly the same address. He thought there was something fishy going on.

Both Continental and Northwest Airlines have signed up Microsoft to build their online booking engines. We're likely to see more of this. Microsoft just got out from under and exclusivity agreement it had with American Express for online business travel bookings and processing, and it's clear the Redmond, Wash., giant is looking to expand its stake in online travel.

I've written a lot about the business side of travel on the Internet and want to have fun now. Let me know of favorite destination Web sites, either professionally run or, preferably, done just for the fun of it. We'll take a look at these in a future column.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Sunday. You can reach him any day now at dbkirby@pressroom.com.