American Airlines Ticket Crisis Widens

By Terry Green
Jan 6 2011

American Airlines announced this morning that more online companies in the US have opted to not carry their fares.

This is a widening crisis for the low-cost air carrier that has been struggling to get back on track for the past several months. There are but a few companies that have not joined the boycott against the American Airlines tickets but industry experts have said that they will likely join the rest of the crowd.

A group of online travel website owners spoke with the media yesterday and said that American Airlines is trying to strong-arm the smaller sites into changing the way that they find fares to publish. This tactic has become very common in the world over travel bookings and now the sites are starting to fight back.

Sabre announced yesterday that they would be joining the boycott, taking the total number of online companies giving AA the boot to 7. At this time only Kayak and Priceline have not joined the boycott as far as major companies in the industry go.

American said in a statement that they hope to resolve this matter peacefully with the online travel companies and also said that they were hoping to change the way that published fares were found to help cut down on the costs which can be passed on to passengers.

Thos boycotting the airline have said that they would be willing to sit down for talks about possible compromises in the future.