I think the issue is that ITA, Skyscanner et al who built their own tech freed themselves from slow old GDS platforms (which were ancient mainframes and designed for travel agents). They consume the schedules, the fare rules and then they will use 'direct connect' XML or JSON feeds directly from the airlines (if they are available, not all airlines do them), then a GDS, and sometimes they will have to scrape a website where a LCC doesn't use GDS or give a metasearch site api access to a) regularly check fares for a given flight, time & date and b) to do a 'live' search e.g on skyscanner, it will often say 'price was checked 30 mins ago' (which is the cached and stored in the db price) and then when you select it and a modal popups up it does an ajax call to check if that price is still live. But to more simply answer your question - many airlines love 'direct connect' as it bypassed the GDS who, remember, they pay fees to and have had them over a barrel for decades. And metasearch sites prefer it to. It's a direct relationship. It is a really complicated industry and I often read gross over-simplifications of x site versus y site.