Delta Air Lines has just announced the official launching of its online corporate booking system for business travel.

This hardly appears as a revolutionary concept in the online airline business and one can even wonder why such system did not appear earlier when compared with the other companies and start-ups such as Biztravel.com.

In my opinion, the novelty of the concept lies in the fact that a new service is being offered to its corporate customers but also that a new aggressive Internet price policy is being set up, which is business travel centred.

Indeed, thanks to this new booking system called "Delta.com for Corporations", business travellers will benefit from negotiated fares straight away but also from discounts and web promotional fares.

Delta's official words are pretty clear: the aim is to eliminate transactional fees: "that online booking capabilities reduce costs by eliminating transactional fees".

The eTravel and the eBusiness never intended to eliminate intermediaries, the niche Travelocity and Expedia manage to carve out for themselves well prove it, but undoubtedly aimed at creating new ones or forcing the old ones to fit in.

Up till now, the battle mainly took place in the BtoC sector. But the Delta Air Lines example well shows that the stakes have recently become just as high in the BtoB sector.

What enterprises find most interesting is the fact that it allows them to manage online (and in real time) their travel budget. But setting up an aggressive price policy that no longer even bothers to spare the traditional intermediaries might well prove able to modify the whole deal on the Internet.

Please be aware that what paved the way for this strategy is the simplified transactional possibilities offered by the Internet.

Indeed, if Delta Air Line had wanted to use this very strategy in the pre-Internet era, it would have had to create units competing with travel agencies and to set up heavy and costly structures. But nothing like this is required any more and even though you might have to take on new people if you want to be able to offer these new services, there is no comparison with the cost it would have been offline.

The decrease of the transactional costs has made it possible for the Internet to become more and more integrated into the companies, which explains why Delta Air Lines no longer hesitates in running the chance of upsetting part of its traditional distribution network.

It will be interesting to see how the other airline companies react in the coming months and the actual impact said reaction has on Rosenbluth/Biztravel.