If they are, it's a bad bet. To be clear, the HUGE driver for the growth in online travel in the late 90's and early 00's was category adoption in total. Folks started doing something that they never did before, for the first time. 9/11 just made it harder for competitors (suppliers mostly) to participate fully because they were struggling for existence. That's not happening again. And during the next downturn, you will have suppliers much better prepared to fight for business directly, rather than having 3rd parties do heavy lifting for them, so the likelihood is that they will offer the deals etc themselves vs. cranking up margins for 3rd parties and letting them benefit. Of course, this won't be the case for all, but in general that's what you are more likely to see.