Is Asia.com a legitimate airline site?  Their fares to Nanning, China
from BWI are about $500.00 less than those I could find on Expedia.

I became suspicious because they only allowed 9 digits for entry of a
standard 10 digit phone number.

I need an answer that is certain or I could lose $1200.

thank you...paul j. tremont

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Request for Question Clarification by politicalguru-ga on 19 Aug 2006 00:44 PDT

Dear Mr. Tremont, 

Let me tell you my thoughts after having done the Research, and you
will tell me if this will suffice as an answer.

(1) Asia.com is a domain registered since 1997 by Gerald Gorman, who
bought many potentially profitable domain names back in the 1990s
(USA.com, India.com etc.); only recently (less than a year, according
to http://www.archive.org), it became a "budget flight" site.

Gorman was involved, being the owner of these sites, in several
spamming or domain name litigations - but one should mention that
regarding the spamming/scam issues - his domains (including asia.com)
gave away free email addresses, and scammers also use Yahoo.com as
their email address.

(2) Gorman is registered in New Jersey, but only with India.com. 

(3) Unlike similar sites, it hasn't launched a major PR campaign, the
site is not mentioned in press releases and so on. You'd expect a site
like that, from a veteran businessman, to do a thing like that.

(4) Similarly, I have found absolutely no reviews of the site on any
major reviews site.

Summary:
- The site itself has a "real" address and a "real" owner. Inasmuch it
doesn't seem like a "scam".
- However, the fact that it is virtually unknown (and also not linked
to any travel agency) is a bit suspicious.

By the way, many agents/sites I know could do better than Expedia now
and then, so this is an indicator to nothing.