Not anymore. Oh, no. The whole notion of "best ticket" has been blown out of the skies.

Ask 12 passengers on any random flight today how much they paid for their tickets, and you're likely to get 12 different answers.

Why? Well, Fred the friendly travel agent has been joined by a host of not-so-friendly competitors: the name-your-price site Priceline.com, online travel agencies such as Travelocity.com and Expedia.com, the airlines' own Web sites, discount online sites and traditional offline bucket shop discounters. And the plot will thicken this fall when two new players enter the fray -- the absurdly christened, airline-backed Orbitz.com (I'm glad the Justice Department is looking into possible monopolistic illegalities associated with this site, but shouldn't it also investigate whoever came up with that name?) and, launching in September, the lowest-fare-available Hotwire.

With so many sellers to choose from, what's the poor traveler to do?

Or to put it more plainly: Who has the cheapest tickets?

There is no easy answer to this question, dear traveler. The best we can do is take a close look at the different players to see how they work and whom they work for. Let's begin this week with Priceline.

Priceline launched on April 6, 1998, with a groundbreaking idea, and an equally groundbreaking technological innovation designed to take advantage of two different factors in the airfare equation: consumer flexibility and unoccupied seats.

As Priceline spokesman Brian Ek explains it, "The airlines fly with up to 700,000 empty seats a day. Naturally they would love to sell those seats if they could without affecting their retail fare structure. What Priceline did was to come up with a system that allowed the airlines to have their cake and eat it too."

How?

Airline revenue managers -- whose work habits must make stockbrokers look like beach bums -- are constantly juggling fares on hundreds of routes, balancing revenues, capacity and price to make as much money for the airline as possible. If a route is undersold, the manager knocks down the fare. If a route is filling up immediately, the manager inflates the fare. These managers are ultimately responsible for the 12 different fares your neighbors paid on your last flight.

In 1997 Priceline hooked up with one of the industry's principal computer reservations systems, Worldspan, to develop software that would allow revenue managers to make real-time adjustments to their seat fares and restrictions in a special section -- what Ek calls a "partition" -- in the Worldspan database. Each airline had access only to its own area in this database, but Priceline had access to all the airlines' areas. "Because airlines do not see their competitors' prices, this creates a favorable environment for the consumer," Ek says.

This unique area is the crux of Priceline's name-your-fare system. To use the Priceline site, consumers log on and specify a flight date, departure point and arrival point; they then specify the fare they're willing to pay for this ticket and give their credit card number. In doing so, they agree to leave anytime between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. on the day they have specified, and they agree to buy the ticket -- all sales final -- if Priceline finds a fare that meets their price. (They agree to a number of other conditions as well.)

When a consumer makes a bid, Priceline takes the offer and then automatically scours its partition database to see if it can find a ticket that costs less than the customer offered. The consumer gets an answer back within one hour. If Priceline finds a ticket at the right price, it buys it immediately and e-mails the customer the good news. Take that, Fred.

The revenue that Priceline makes on each ticket is the difference between the fare price that it paid and the price the consumer offered.

That's it.

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