On the Internet, the business world’s equivalent to the plains of Tanzania, a website called BiddingForTravel has a similar relationship with PriceLine, the bovine-size site where travelers bid for an acceptable price on hotel rooms, airline tickets and rental cars. Sheryl Mexic, the Houston-based former legal secretary who now spends 16 hours a day running BiddingForTravel, started collecting customer feedback on PriceLine in August of 1999, just 18 months after the launch of the Internet’s first big bid-for-travel site. Initially, she says, hers was a simple message board on Yahoo where PriceLine users would report how much they paid for hotel rooms and other services. But so many people volunteered so much information, that she built a separate site and moved its hosting to a company that specializes in robust message boards. As traffic continued to grow, Mexic started selling ads, and she set up affiliate relationships with online travel companies. Today, she says, the site has about 6,000 unique visitors a day, and she earns what she describes modestly as enough money to support herself.

Despite the long days, BiddingForTravel has been good for Mexic, and it would seem to be good for PriceLine, whose customers can save the expense of bidding more than they have to. But the cozy relation between PriceLine and BiddingForTravel is not good for everyone. The hotels that sell their rooms on PriceLine cannot fetch prices as high as they would if buyers were not so well informed from BiddingForTravel. Last year, when some of those hotels read in the Wall Street Journal that PriceLine was actually working with BiddingForTravel -- paying commissions to the site through an affiliate marketing deal -- they demanded that PriceLine sever ties with Mexic. PriceLine’s response was the kind of no-brainer that Brer Rabbit would love: Please don’t make me stop paying commissions to that third party-site. PriceLine ended their deal with BiddingForTravel, but BiddingForTravel remained as helpful as ever to PriceLine customers.

These days, PriceLine Vice President for Communications Brian Ek bends over backwards to avoid any endorsement of BiddingForTravel. “Our view is that there is not much we can do about [BiddingForTravel],” he says. “BiddingForTravel is the natural outcome of freedom of speech. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just there.”

Ek’s reluctance to utter a kind word about BiddingForTravel is particularly strange for someone who admits that PriceLine itself once considered adding a similar service to its site. In the end, he says, the company decided that such a service would conflict with the agreement they had with suppliers. So instead of telling customers how much they would have to bid, Ek explains, PriceLine decided to give them clues, publishing, for example, the percentage of the retail price of trips that has been saved by recent bidders.

Some observers of the online travel business say Sheryl Mexic is lucky that PriceLine’s suppliers want her to go away. That’s because, they say, Mexic depends on the threats of PriceLine’s suppliers almost as much as she depends on Priceline. Without those threats, PriceLine would launch its own version of BiddingForTravel, and then BiddingForTravel could face serious competition from, well, Priceline.

On the Internet, and on the plains of Tanzania, ecosystems are often more complicated than they seem, but even by Internet standards, the twisted tale of PriceLine and BiddingForTravel seems bizarre. Does PriceLine really have to bend to the demands of its suppliers? Shouldn’t the powerful travel site ignore the whining of its suppliers and give its own customers the information that they really want? What have they really got to lose? Is this business sense or nonsense?