Winging It

This may appear to be more inside-the-airline-industry information than you really need, but we think it's worthy of a minute of your time. Southwest Airlines has signed a 10-year agreement with Galileo, a British company that operates one of the world's largest airline reservations systems. The deal will put Southwest's fares on the computers of thousands of travel agents in North America. Southwest has had a more limited agreement with Sabre, a U.S. company that is another of the other major operators of a "global distribution system," or GDS, for agents.

As Web-savvy travelers know, Southwest's fares and schedules aren't in the other big online travel services for consumers, including Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity. Southwest has never thought it was worth the fees those services charge. What's more, Southwest.com is one of the most popular Web sites of any kind. It accounts for 70 percent of Southwest's ticket sales, and ranks not far behind the big three sites that serve multiple carriers in the number of visitors it gets. A deal with Galileo will put the great majority of Southwest's fares in front of agents who use its GDS. And Road Warriors may really benefit. Travel agents still sell half of all airline tickets, and about half of all business travel is managed by corporate travel departments that use agents. Despite the flocking of airline customers to the Web to book and plan their own travel over the last decade, thousands of companies continue to use agents in one way or another, either having them book trips or serving as monitors of travel policies.