Travel startups and APIs

At a VC event there were 3 or 4 travel startups that pitched, some with nothing more than vague business plans. One had working code in the form of a website, but there was no demo.

The pitch of many of these startups was, basically: "we search low-cost airlines, and none of our competitors do" where in competitors they included Expedia, Travelocity and even Kayak.

After cursorily looking at the source of one of those sites, it seems basically built on an Amadeus API [1]. It seems that what they're doing is essentially the equivalent of

(select * from flights where type = :LOWCOST or type = :highcost)

and consequently, the advantage they trumpet over the other sites is simply that they claim the others use

(select * from flights where type = :highcost)

Am I missing something here? Does Amadeus perhaps need licensing agreements before they let you search low-cost fares? Why would existing sites not be able to compete by searching the very same fare type buckets?

[1] I assume that although different pricing engines could be searched by the backend, they are not doing so, because if they were, they'd hide their front-end Amadeus API calls behind their own API, and then on the backend they'd mux the search out to Amadeus and any other pricing engines. Also, since the code is so liberally littered with API calls, I'm guessing Amadeus/Sabre make it really easy to use their API, perhaps almost to the point of plug and play.

(edit: wording)