American Airlines & Kayak: Why no open API?

In a widely reported move, American Airlines recently severed its relationship with booking site Kayak.  Which leads me to wonder: why are other airlines partnering with sites like Kayak and Orbitz in deals that require them to pay a booking fee?

Don't get me wrong - I am not suggesting that these airlines should try to block comparison booking sites. In fact, entirely the opposite.

They should simply put out free APIs or searchable feeds for anyone to use - for free! This would encourage the creation of more booking comparison sites, and the ones with the best user experience would win that game. Kayak and Orbitz would be welcome to use these feeds as well, but they won't get paid any money for a referral. Instead, these sites would have to make money through ads or other means.

The only cost the airlines would have to bear would be the cost of supporting the search requests made on the APIs, which would be just single digit cents per 1000 API calls.  By limiting the number of calls per developer by default (say, a few 1000 per day default), and increasing it for trusted sites with proven ctrs and conversion, they can keep this cost very low, to a point where it's negligible.

This is much better solution to this problem than blocking Kayak or paying Orbitz, both of which seem like outdated ideas.

I don't understand why airlines aren't doing this already. Does anyone know a good reason?

Comments

[Rajiv Bhat]

While I agree that APIs make good sense I think that AA did not remove Kayak listings for monetary reasons.

From someone at Kayak (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080725/1322411794.shtml ) responding to an article on TechDirt.
" To clarify a few things:

1. AA does not get double charged when a user clicks on an Orbitz result for an AA flight. If the user books that flight on Orbitz, then AA pays Orbitz. Kayak gets nothing from AA.

2. No deal was struck to provide Orbitz or Kayak lower fares then AA.com.

AA told us that we had to suppress search results from other web sites if we wanted to keep showing their fares and we said "no". I can't speak for AA's reason for doing this, but they were certainly not being double charged."

Also, Kayak makes its money from pay-per-click (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayak.com ). Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz charge an extra $5 (http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/08-01/which-airfare-site-is-the-cheapest.html ) and this could be because all of them get their information from the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Tariff_Publishing_Company ).