About the Airline Flights Internet Booking Engines IBE:
A search for wholesale priced or deeply discounted airline tickets must be conducted across a fragmentary and diverse airline consolidator industry. Consolidators usually pay an airline 40 percent to 60 percent of the published airfares. Since their margin is kept small, the customer price will range from 50 to 80 percent of the airline published fare. The companies that comprise the industry are restricted to reselling a few seats on each flight on each date. Each company negotiates their own prices and maintains their own database of flights and prices for tickets they own. No global distribution or central reservation system exists to allow any air traveler or travel agent to shop them all from one interface.
So ATC Worldwide, airtravelcenter.ch, has developed and will continue to improve a website that facilitates the otherwise arduous task of finding and shopping multiple websites that offer airline consolidator flights and fares to online travel shoppers. The workaround is the placement of multiple internet booking engines at one website. Since airline ticket resellers do not contract with all airlines for all itineraries on all dates, the number of discounted flights and seats are limited. As those allotments are sold out, next higher pricing will be displayed in the flight search results. When all pricing allotments are sold for a given date, normal airline pricing will be displayed. To find a deeper discount, a shopper must visit another airline consolidator and use their booking engine to search for flights and see if they have seats available.
ATC Worldwide saves you time by letting you click a new booking engine into place on the same web page. This way, you can shop multiple conslidators and air ticket agencies efficiently.
At one end of the airline consolidator spectrum are small companies that buy tickets from one or two airlines and resell them to a niche population visiting one or two destinations. They are usually formed by emigres who want to serve fellow expats and or promote tourism in their native land. At the other end of the airline consolidator spectrum are large companies that buy tickets from 35 to 45 airlines and resell them to the general public through travel agencies and corporate or governmental travel coordinators. While many of the larger companies serve a regional audience traveling to select world regions, larger companies have begun to serve a world of air travelers going from and to any airport in any country. In all, about 4000 consolidators operate their enterprises across the globe and their forte is international flights. Domestic flights have only recently begun to appear in air ticket reseller inventories and are likely to remain but a fraction of the flights offered at consolidator rates. While meta flight search tools are available to search many airlines and travel agencies at one go, consolidators are not yet participating and may not ever. Most sell to a closely defined niche audience or to a larger audience through travel agencies and governments. Most make announcements to their niche audience using local publications online and offline. Some few of the very largest consolidators have been moving to online operations yet still market their fares through Internet travel agencies and specialized websites like ATC Worldwide. They still maintain their own databases and do not participate in global distribution systems. To access the database of each consolidator, a unique Internet Booking Engine, IBE, is required. Thus the need to faciliate the use of each booking engine rather than one engine for all. Recently, a handful of technology companies have developed database management services which allow consolidators and airline ticket discounters to expand their reach by listing their inventory in a shared database which can be accessed via one IBE. A traveler or travel agent can use that IBE to access the privately held fares of multiple consolidators at one search and see a display of all available flights. Upon a decision to purchase a displayed flight and price, a booking order is sent to the consolidator or discounter offering that selection. ATC Worldwide now has several of these multiple consolidator booking engines on site.
In all, ATC Worldwide has been working with nearly 100 airline consolidators and ticket discounters in 37 countries. A ten year history makes the site a clearinghouse. Only those companies that consistently treat travelers well are presented and some have been doing so for that full ten year period. Ten more is a nice thought.
By the way, in so many situations, a person can save at very least one dollar or euro for each minute they devote to shopping online. With so many privately held fares in so many proprietary databases, finding that lowest priced seat can take thirty to ninety minutes. But saving thirty to ninety dollars, or a great amount more, is a nicely convenient way to write yourself a check.
ATC Worldwide is privately held by Rosemarie Metz-Brungard who is somewhat related to the spokesperson, Steve Brungard. Airtravelcenter.ch was developed to facilitate the acquisition of diverse information, services, reservations and tickets for a world of people who travel by air.

Flights IBE by Region of Departure

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