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Garage is an investor in a discount travel company called cFares. First, here’s some background info about the travel business: A large portion of airfare expenditures flow through the GDS systems (ie: Sabre, Amadeus, and Galileo). “First generation online travel sites” such as Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz rely on available inventory within the GDS supply.

Newer “meta search” entrants such as Kayak and Sidestep go beyond ticket
supplies in the GDS systems by also searching directly through the databases of airlines in order to get an expanded array of better prices and tickets. (Airlines do not put all their inventory in the
GDS systems—they keep some for their own sites as a way of incenting consumers to
come to them directly).

cFares.com also has access to the GDS systems and direct access to airline’s published
inventories, but according to the company it stands apart from these other sites for three reasons:

  1. cFares is the first and only online travel site with exclusive relationships
    that gives it access to the $20 billion of consolidator “net” airfares.
    Consolidators are travel wholesalers who commit to buy large blocks of
    inventory from the airlines at volume (also called “net”) discounts. They
    are restricted from selling directly to consumers and have historically only
    offered these fares to travel agents.

    Also, while consolidators have inventory in one system (usually paper or a
    local computer), they have to access the GDS systems to determine whether a
    specific fare is actually available. As a result of these technical and
    business model impediments, consolidator “net” fares have not been brought
    online. cFares is the first online travel service that has developed
    technology to allow consumers to find and book these fares—often hundreds of
    dollars less than found elsewhere—directly and in real time.

  2. cFares offers something called “dynamic rebates.” cFares’s proprietary technology
    allows airlines to know what is happening at the point of sale and lower
    their prices dynamically to win a specific customer—for example, when they
    have lots of empty seats on a specific flight. cFares customers
    get a custom-designed price in real-time and receive the savings from cFares in the form of a rebate to their credit card after they submit their flight confirmation number.
  3. cFares has a unique name-your-own-price service called cAgent.
    Unlike other name-your-price services, which involve “buying blind,” cAgent
    provides total transparency so that consumers know
    the airline, itinerary, and price before they have to pay. Travelers can
    pick a specific flight and then set up a persistent search for a fare that
    they are willing to pay. cAgent will seek out that fare and can hold it for
    twenty-four hours before the customer has to pay. Since airfares typically fluctuate
    several times during the day, cAgent snags the fare on the downturn.

cFares’s business model is a combination of Costco and Walmart. Anyone can
search the site to see what fares are available. People who sign up for free
gold memberships can purchase any of cFares low, publicly available
fares—this is comparable to the Walmart model.

However, in order to get direct access to cFares’s “net” wholesale airfares,
one-of-a-kind deals, and cAgent, consumers must become Platinum members at a cost of $50/year. This is the Costco model where a membership-driven
retailer brings consistently low wholesale prices directly to the consumer.
With cFares this membership pays for itself in at most two trips.

cFares is offering a special deal for readers of my blog. If you enter
“guysblog1” into the coupon code field, you will be able to sign up for the
Platinum membership at 50% off. This offer expires on Wednesday at 6:00 pm Pacific
time.