On November 10, 2003 we received a letter from Navitaire, current owner of the Open Skies product, in which the CEO puts us "on notice" that "some" of our customer websites, "especially the first page of the booking process, bear marked similarities" to a circa 1997 interface in which Navitaire claim they hold unspecified rights. We have never heard of this interface.

The letter is quite incredible, and we have displayed it for public viewing within the News section of our website.

From a legal standpoint we could ignore this letter. Its insinuations are groundless. But no matter how baseless, the legal threats of a big company can have an impact on a smaller company.

• We are spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with this unsubstantiated "concern,"
• We have received questions from potential partners about the impact of having to fend off frivolous actions,
• We anticipate some prospects may be discouraged to contact us.

We believe this is the point of Navitaire's threat, to interfere with our continuing success, which is increasingly in direct competition with the Open Skies product.

For the record, we were in business before the introduction of the Open Skies system. The AirKiosk system was developed and available prior to both Hewlett Packard's purchase of Open Skies and Navitaire's later acquisition of the system from HP. We have never before heard from Open Skies or Navitaire. The only change in the landscape is that, within recent months, we have talked to Open Skies users curious about migrating to our system.

There is no indication at all from Navitaire about which of our customers or what specific aspect of the self-booking process they question. For those less familiar with the self-booking process, the first page offers a form to select a "From City," "To City," "Dates of Travel" and "Number of Passengers."

Beyond the generic processes of any Internet "first booking page," the AirKiosk system offers the most advanced features in the industry, including real-time low fare search and online changes. The AirKiosk system is the only system which offers an entire reservations solution on a single, Internet-based platform. All of our user interfaces -- whether for consumers, travel agents, airline control staff or ground handling agents -- were independently developed on an architectural platform completely unique to the AirKiosk system.

We do not like being bullied, we do not appreciate innuendos against our customers, and we are well prepared to continue our unique and advanced developments for the benefit of our customers and all interested travel vendors.

Novak Niketic
President, Sutra, Inc.