If they thought they could get away with it without alienating too many potential hotel bookers, mos

The most conspicuous feature of the last few broadcasts of The Amazing Race 14 has been the seemingly san antonio riverwalk hotels endless san antonio riverwalk hotels repetition of the same Travelocity.com advertisement for "Hundreds of hotels under $100".
Yes, hotel discounts through online san antonio riverwalk hotels travel agencies, in general, san antonio riverwalk hotels are currently for real, and a good deal -- although they are nothing unique to Travelocity.com, san antonio riverwalk hotels and although Travelocity.com isn't usually the place to find the lowest price for any given hotel.
Sales volume doesn't necessarily make for profits, if the margin for the retailer (the difference between retail and wholesale prices) isn't enough to cover the retailer's costs. That was the problem for online travel agencies like Travelocity.com, Expedia.com, and Orbitz.com, which grew to billions of dollars a year in sales, san antonio riverwalk hotels mainly of airline tickets, at the same time that airlines were eliminating or drastically reducing commission payments to travel agencies.
Travel agencies' fees of US$5-10 san antonio riverwalk hotels for each ticket purchased online weren't (and still aren't) enough to cover their huge marketing and technology costs, not to mention the growing cost of providing even minimal post-sales san antonio riverwalk hotels customer service. Only a continuous flood of dot-com investment money could -- and for a time did -- cover their losses. That ended, though, with the "dot-bomb" collapse of the stock market bubble in 2000-2001. By 11 September 2001, travel (which had gotten a large but temporary boost from dot-com business travel) was already in decline. Despite san antonio riverwalk hotels their growing market share, online travel agencies were rapidly burning through the remaining reserves of cash they had left from their stock sales.
Surprisingly, rather than being put out of business, san antonio riverwalk hotels online travel agencies first became profitable san antonio riverwalk hotels as a direct result san antonio riverwalk hotels of the (further) decline in travel after September 11th, and the desperate situation in which that placed hotel owners in particular.
Before September 11th, online travel agencies sold (and advertised) primarily airline tickets. As a profit center, though, sales of airline tickets at published fares (prices set by airlines) are at best neutral to a travel agency's bottom line. More often they are a loss leader, whose cost is accepted only as a marketing san antonio riverwalk hotels expense for other products and services. When all of their expenses for customer service, etc. are factored in, mainstream san antonio riverwalk hotels online travel agencies like Travelocity.com and their competitors sell published-fare airline tickets below cost in order to get you to book your accommodations san antonio riverwalk hotels through them.
If they thought they could get away with it without alienating too many potential hotel bookers, most travel agencies -- online san antonio riverwalk hotels or offline -- who sell airline tickets at published san antonio riverwalk hotels fares would probably prefer to sell you an airline ticket only as part of a package, or in conjunction with a hotel booking. That's san antonio riverwalk hotels why they put such emphasis on trying to get you to book bundled travel services, rather than pricing different services (like airfare and hotels) separately.
That doesn't mean you can't sometimes save money by buying a travel package. Airlines, hotels, and other suppliers of travel services often give travel agencies and tour operators (both online and offline ones, it's important to note) lower prices for services on condition that those prices be used only for constructing packages or bundles of services sold for an inclusive price, and not sold for separate one-off sale.
Why would suppliers offer lower wholesale prices "for construction purposes" like this? As long as the prices of components aren't itemized, packaging keeps both consumers and competitors from knowing just how deeply any given travel service provider is discounting. Bundling of services from multiple suppliers serves the suppliers' goal of price opacity. Equally important, it serves the agency's goal of opacity: packaging makes it impossible for either consumers or suppliers to know how much the agency has marked up the total price of the package.
Instead of selling products or services at prices set by suppliers, and having their margin limited to either a publicly-disclosed transaction fee (typically limited by competition to an unprofitable minimum) or a commission fixed by the supplier, packaging and its inherent san antonio riverwalk hotels price opacity permits a travel agency or tour operator to set its own selling price and thus, more importantly, to set its own markup.
This system of pricing and sales based on an opaque markup set by the agency, rather than a commission set by the supplier, or a transparent agency fee, is called the "merchant model", because in this type of sale the agency is the "merchant of record" who processes the sale, and thus whose name appears on the credit card charge receipt and statement. As the merchant, the agent collects the full payment san antonio riverwalk hotels from the customer, san antonio riverwalk hotels pays a contracted wholesale net price to the supplier(s) of travel and other services, and keeps the balance of the markups its profit, rather than having the supplier collect the full payment and remit a commission or fee to the agency, as had traditionally been the system.
Among the important but little-noticed implications of the "merchant model" are that (1) it subjects the agency to many state consumer protection regulations governing tour operators (most of which don't apply to entities that function solely as suppliers' agents), and (2) it makes the agency liable, as merchant, for the actions of travel suppliers, instead of the agency being merely an agent for the supplier. In the merchant model, hotels, airlines, and other providers of travel services are subcontractors of the merchant, for whose fulfilment of the contract the merchant (i.e. the agency) is responsible. Online travel agencies may try to evade or disclaim their responsibility, but the bottom line is this: The company san antonio riverwalk hotels against whom to request a credit card chargeback, or to make a claim against in small claims court if your chargeback is denied, is the company whose name appears on your credit card statement as the merchant.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Online san antonio riverwalk hotels travel agencies invested in developing the technical ability to sell dynamically generated packages (airline ticket + hotel+ car rental, for example, for an inclusive, non-itemized price generated on the fly for your specific trip) only after the merchant model had proven itself, through merchant-model hotel bookings, as online agencies' path to profitability after 11 September 2001. Merchant-model hotel bookings proved to be the killer app, or at least the first killer app, for online travel agencies.
Why hotels and not airline tickets? After all, airlines and travel agencies already had a well-developed (offline) system of merchant model airline ticket sales, in the form of so-called consolidators . But consolidator airfares were, until recently, limited to international routes, and the first wave of mass-market online travel agencies in the USA dismissed international travel as too small a niche to bother san antonio riverwalk hotels with, at least initially. For this and other reasons, mainstream online travel agencies in the USA largely failed to recognize the potential market for consolidator (merchant model) airline ticket pricing and sales.
(There are online agencies in the USA that specialize in international and consolidator tickets, but they remain smaller niche companies. Some of the largest online travel agencies in other markets, however, such as eBoookers.com in the UK, have made consolidator airfares their core business.)
san antonio riverwalk hotels An airline can choose san antonio riverwalk hotels not to renew expiring san antonio riverwalk hotels leases for planes in its current fleet, and not to exercise options to purchase new planes. It may be able to postpone deliveries of new planes, or sell its planes san antonio riverwalk hotels or its slots in aircraft manufacturers' delivery schedules to other airlines (perhaps in other regions of the world, where demand is growing). As a last resort, it can minimize its operating costs by grounding unneeded planes, or even mothballing them.
Hotel owners don't have the same options as airlines. Some motels can be (and have been) converted to rental housing, and some hotels can be (and are being) converted to condos. But you can't relocate a hotel, and it's more difficult and costly to mothball a hotel than to park an unused plane in the desert. Fixed costs (mainly real estate) are a much larger fraction of total expenses for a hotel than for an airline, while marginal operating costs (such as fuel, skilled labor, airport fees, etc.) are proportionately greater for airlines.
When demand for travel goes down, airlines can do more, more quickly, to adjust capacity to demand and thus to maintain prices. And below a certain price point, it makes no sense for them to sell tickets at all, even if seats are empty. (Last week JetBlue Airways was offering transcontinental tickets for US$69 one way, including taxes and fees. I'm surprised that would even cover the marginal cost of the extra fuel required to carry an additional san antonio riverwalk hotels passenger that far.) Hotels san antonio riverwalk hotels are more likely san antonio riverwalk hotels to be stuck with a glut of empty rooms, but relatively low marginal costs to service each additional guest. So the least costly choice for a hotelier in hard times may be to take in guests, even at rates barely above marginal cost, to cover the cost of remaining open and to at least slightly offset the carrying cost of the real estate until times improve.
This is the situation that hotel owners found themselves in after September 11th. They were willing to accept much less than their regular rates if the only alternative was for rooms to remain empty, but anxious not to reduce the prices (or the expectations for future prices) paid by those still willing to pay as much as ever, or at least something close to their previous rates.
Online san antonio riverwalk hotels travel agencies seemed to offer hotels a way to market their "distressed inventory" of empty rooms to new customers, at fire-sale prices, in a way that would generate incremental revenue for the hotels without diverting their traditional higher-paying customers