Many agents retain the airline commission.

Often, however, agents will charge their corporate customers large fees, but, in return, give them the airline commissions.

The passenger pays a total of $410, but the travel agent gets a total of $30, including the airline commission.

But owners and officials in the travel-agency industry - which received a total of $6.28 billion in airline commissions last year - have been sputtering with rage.

The biggest losers in all this are likely to be local travel agencies, which have already been squeezed by cutbacks in airline commissions.

And in the wake of shrinking airline commissions the smaller, independent, less established travel agencies are facing hard times.

International air fares accounted for almost 42 percent of total airline commissions in July, compared with 35 percent last year.

But agencies that openly rebated part of airline commissions to the pleasure traveler, like McTravel in Illinois, lost court battles to the airlines and could not stay in business.

The company earns the airline commissions and pays the agency predetermined fees for such services as ticketing, low-fare searches and management reporting.

They are also being squeezed by a reduction in airline commissions, initially in September 1997 for domestic tickets, and since then for overseas tickets and Amtrak.