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Technology Stocks : IFLY - travel sales on the web pure play -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LTK007 who wrote (4508)	3/17/1999 11:51:00 PM
From: IFLYer	Respond to of 4761

Cheap Tickets is a company that will go IPO this week or next. It has more booking than IFLY perhaps because it also sells cruise which is a higher cost item, but its revenue is the same as IFLY. The key thing is Cheap Tickets is a profitable company. How? This company operates call centers with twice the number of agents as IFLY. It has a web site but the amount of sales going through the internet is only 9%. So this validates once more the business model of IFLY: travel companies need to have sales agents to be profitable because 1) it can earn higher commission, 2) it can quote lower airfare and 3) live travel agents help close the sale better. IFLY has implemented an interactive web site that provides to the customers the best of both worlds, internet technologies and interaction with a live agent. Cheap Tickets will offer 3.5M shares at 13 which will bring in 45M, almost as much as the current market cap of IFLY. With 21M shares outstanding, the market cap will be a whooping 273M. Remember Cheap Tickets has about the same revenue as IFLY (Its earnings is almost 3 times as IFLY at 1.1M). P.S. I checked its web site and found that the quoted airfare isn't cheap. I think the company quotes lower airfare through its toll free number but I haven't checked.