A question: Understanding the Business of airline agents

I was booking a flight ticket from Bhubaneswar to Bangalore. I looked for the flight details in makemytrip.com. It gave kingfisher as the cheapest flight (cost was my primary concern and time being the second one).

I checked the same in Yatra.com. It also provided Kingfisher flight IT3446 starting at 12.40 PM is the cheapest one. Fairs are almost comparable. Yatra was quoting 5,660 where as makemytrip.com was quoting Rs 5663. I was looking the price at kingfisher. It was quiting 5,649 with 250 flying miles. So I decided to book the ticket using kingfisher as it is the cheapest one for the same service.

I look at the business model of makemytrip.com or yatra.com. They do spend money in writing the software, buying hardware and getting all the data and maintaining it in their database. And providing high availability (high availability costs a lot, its not cheap). What ended up is I used their service to route to the appropriate site. Had the Indian airlines cheaper in Yatra,com, I would have looked at the price in Indian airlines in stead of kingfisher.

As a business user I may not be doing the right stuff for makemytrip or yatra, but as a rational user I look for lowest price for the same service. I believe there will be many users like me who uses Yatra or makemytrip for search but not to book.

If that is the case, then mykemytrip.com or Yatra.com is not going to be profitable business. They need to provide tickets at cheaper price than the airline itself. They do provide hotel bookings at cheaper price, but I don't need it either in Bangalore or at Bhubaneswar. I am not sure if the hotel bookings can be done at the hotel's site at a cheaper price.

I am confused how the business runs for them? How do they beat up price competition from the airline itself? What are the added advantage they provide to customer, so that customer uses their site, not that of the airline.

I have no clue, if anybody has some idea, please put them forward