Look what happened to the credit markets when we abolished the relationship between a banker and a mortgage. Look at what happened to Wall Street when first-day pops of over 100 percent became the expected norm instead of a disgrace.

Consider these magazine publishers who are faced with third party hustlers who try to sell magazine subscriptions using child labor and aggressive tactics. The magazines don’t just accept the income and mail out the magazines, they refuse to deal with such ‘aggregators’.

But along comes ‘The Web’ and ‘price scrapers’ and suddenly airlines and hotels are willing to deal with aggregators and wholesale off their seating capacity or room capacity. If it hasn’t sold at the “sticker price” the hotel/airline is willing to sell to the hustlers at a steep discount even though they know the hustler will turn around and screw his customers.

I’ve never particularly liked those websites that go thru all the zillions of permutations and combinations of flights and then present me with a humungous list of those that go to absurd layovers no where near a direct route to my ultimate destination. It may be nice that I can fly from Los Angeles to San Francico via O’Hare but who would want to do that? So I have no love for those travel sites. And hotels that sell rooms with “sticker prices” aren’t particularly high on my list either.

Yet there have been people who walk up to a hotel desk and get a room quote then log onto the internet from the lobby and get an even lower quote.

Hotels seem to see profit in wholesaling their rooms out rather than giving their customers a pleasant stay, pricing their rooms sensibly and refusing to deal with places like Hotel.com.

The solution is to start with sensible prices and have a hotel sell its room to travellers or else not sell it at all. Just as an airline would have to sell its tickets to travellers or not at all.

Its basically, We will try to sell at high prices and when things don’t sell to well, we will wholesale out our empty room or empty airplane seat to a service that rips off its customers and annoys the hell out of them.

What hotel or airline will profit from annoying its customers to such a degree. Its the inefficiency of selling the original product and trying to price it too high to begin with.

I don’t see how these ticket consolidators have a sensible pricing plan either. If you buy a ticket from Kayak but do NOT take the flight, you pay more? I think thats the way it works. Its absurd.

It all stems from the basic premise: a hotel or an airline thinks they will make more money overall … and will never have to pay for annoying their own customers with these “sticker priced” rooms or airline seats.