So many twists in the tale...

Our story on Tuesday said American Airlines could pull the plug on its product feed to Kayak because it doesn't like the way its aa.com search results have to compete with orbitz and cheaptickets results for the same flights

The airline said it could end its relationship with kayak and sister brand sidestep as early as TOMORROW unless concessions were made!

In the meantime, site analytics specialist Compete has come up with some pretty interesting stats on what AA stands to win or lose from such a move.

In June kayak and sidestep sent 1.3% of all visits to aa.com.

These visits converted extremely well with Compete's findings showing that almost 5% of all conversions on aa.com came from kayak or sidestep.

And, visits referred from kayak and sidestep to aa.com converted at 9.3% in June, quite a lot higher than the airline's own website average per visit of 2.7%.

The flip side of the coin is this - Compete also analysed the rate of people clicking over to AA flights on Orbitz revealing that 72% make their way to aa.com anyway at some point over a month.

So, AA will seemingly lose a chunk of business by withdrawing from the meta-searchers but in all likelihood get a good chunk of it back a week or two later!

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution