The travel agent may get the same rate as you, but in many cases, they get upgrades worth a couple of hundred dollars or more per night, from room class upgrades which are significant to extras like champagne on arrival, free breakfast daily, in some cases even free meals and free spa treatments.

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The auction agent ranks the offers by their rate, and then applies to all accepted bids the clearing rate, the lowest rate at which bids will cover all the securities for sale.

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We also know that smoking is a thermogenic agent, meaning that nicotine raises the rate of energy expenditure, metabolic rate.

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Fortunately, you can bypass the travel agent and book directly with a consolidator to get the reduced rate.

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In the early 1980s, a high exchange rate, the product of tight fiscal policy and tight money, was the agent of recession and unemployment.

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MyCyberTwin, which has developed an avatar-based virtual agent for financial institutions that boasts a three-second response time and an astonishing 94% accuracy rate (better than many human reps), is moving downstream.

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"The satisfaction rate in this particular region is the greatest of any geographical area, " says Fran Kramer, an agent at Rochester, N.

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