The reason for this, specially for long haul flights from N.America to India may be because the online travel services only seem to display the full fare ticketed prices, which are simply not competitive.
I'm not too sure why this is. It may be due to capacity constraints for flights going to or originating from India. Until very recently, the GOI pretty much set the capacity levels, which often had very little bearing to actual demand. This made it hard for airlines to set prices for travel far ahead in advance - hence the unrealistic full fare prices. With the recent open skies agreements with various countries this will hopefully change. In fact over the past few months, price quotes for travel to India via the top dog travel sites have come close to matching prices quoted by offline travel agencies. The final nail in the coffin of state control of air travel would be the complete closure or privatization of Air India and Indian Airlines. The proposed merger of these two is a start, but it is not enough. Marlon --- Philip Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: In America, according to > Forrester, a research > company, long-haul travellers spend 58% more than > domestic leisure > travellers, but are more than twice as likely to use > an offline agent to > book their trip. Henry Harteveldt, Forrester's > online travel analyst, points > out that even wealthy long-haul travellers are just > as tantalised by low > prices and many use the internet to research and > plan their journeys, even > though they may end up booking offline.>