on 22 January 2010 
(No Ratings Yet)
A new website — coming “soon” — forsakes the comprehensiveness gods and will focus on discount airlines only.
Budget Center, which recently launched BudgetHotels through an affiliate deal with HotelsCombined, aims to launch BudgetAirlines.com in the next week or s0, and plans to have an exclusive focus on low-cost carriers because “discounted flights and airlines are generally difficult to source on large travel sites such as Expedia and Travelocity and are being under-serviced to online consumers,” the company says.
The company says BudgetAirlines will search discount airlines — including Southwest, JetBlue and WestJet — but “will not search for flights from the major carriers such as British Airways, Cathay Pacific etc. as these airlines do not represent its target market.”
BudgetCenter, which is seeking to leverage its portfolio of budget-oriented travel domains, is coy about whether it will scrape discount carrier websites or whether it has agreements with airlines or third parties for inventory access.
Inventory from Southwest Airlines, for example, isn’t available on most travel websites, although the airline participates in Travelport and, to some extent, the Sabre GDS.
Asked about inventory access, Budget Center president and CEO Bob Chalmers says “we are looking at several options just now…” but he declined to comment further, citing confidentiality agreements.
Related posts:
No way is this going to happen. Nice press release but if they think Southwest is going to suddenly decide to participate in meta and/or OTA channels – and particularly this one – I want what BudgetAirlines.com is smoking.
Southwest does not play in any of the metas (and has sued Kayak and SideStep to prevent even the display of schedules without pricing) and I highly doubt the starting point of such a radical change in distribution will be BudgetAirlines.com
Yes, RyanAir has relented and Southwest may too, but I doubt this is the starting place.
Good thing they are going to shy away from carriers like BA and CX – those are really fair comparisons to Southwest, JetBlue and WestJet – Not a single overlapping route! (Oh, and those guys are all obviously in the GDS/metas/OTAs where they are quite easy to find, contrary to this press release)
Tom: I share your skepticism about BudgetAirlines being able to access Southwest. That is why I asked Chalmers about how he was going to get Southwest. Add Orbitz to your list. Do you remember when Orbitz launched? They began by merely listing Southwest’s schedules and Southwest freaked out and ended that very quickly.
As you know, there are a few corporate travel solutions and third-party providers like BookingBuilder, which access Southwest, but these agreements are rare.
Let’s see how BudgetAirlines handles it — whether it can get Southwest through some third party or whether they decide to try to scrape Southwest. We both know where that will end up if they try.
why would they redirect budgetairlines to a travel holding (tourico) white label site when they could just place a link to budgethotels and give it some juice off of the press release?
looks to me like a premature entry in terms of their product…