>From Travel Weekly NEW YORK -- SAS is adopting a radical new net fare system in Scandinavia under which it will unbundle commissions, requiring both the airline and its travel agents to add service charges to a base fare. The airline charge would vary from about $13 to $44 or more, depending on how the passenger books. SAS, which developed the plan in months of talks with agents and associations, will implement the new system Jan. 1. At the same time, it will stop paying 4% commission to Scandinavian agents for domestic and inter-Scandinavian travel and 7% for international travel. "This model has been thought about in many European countries as well," said Palle Christensen, the airline's vice president of world sales for the Denmark region. "If we're successful with this here, which I think will happen, then I could well see this being the going model in many more countries." ---------------- Now here is an airline that gets it. Seats are commodities. This enables a level playing field for anyone wanting to sell their product. Good for them, hope every other airline is paying attention. I hope the T/As in the US sell the heck out of SAS to reward them for opening the pricing black box to reveal the truth - the contents of the black box was out of date. The downside for all the mainline carriers is that they contine to be squeezed between expensive overheads (too many people, too much of everything else) and the efficiency of slimmed down low cost carriers popping up. Now if the new SAS model helps them reduce distribution costs and grow revenue, maybe it makes sense to go back to them since they do have a good (many would say the best) network (Star). I wonder how long it will take before the rest of Star follows suit - or, better yet, we can buy SAS flights for use on any Star carrier on any city pair....isn't the Internet a wonderful thing? We are watching Schumpeter's creative destruction at work before our eyes.