Disintermediation was one of the buzz words of the late 1990s when Internet 1.0 was filling people with euphoria about how the world would change. Within the context of that time, Internet evangelists were saying that the Internet would largely eliminate the transactional middleman. This clearly came to pass in the travel industry as people researched and booked travel directly on-line, doing a lot of comparison shopping along the way. This, to a large degree, eliminated the travel agent, the middle man in this case, from the equation. When the airlines saw this trend and cancelled the fee they traditionally …