American Airlines yesterday said it was "gratified" by a ruling in the 67th State District Court of Texas in which Judge Don Cosby issued a temporary injunction stopping New York-based FareChase from "scraping" aa.com for fares and inventory. A permanent injunction trial was set for July 7.
Sabre Inc. had intervened in the case on behalf of FareChase to oppose the temporary injunction. The GDS company is one of several FareChase licensees in corporate travel, including Amadeus' E-Travel subsidiary, American Express, Outtask and Worldspan (download free table
here). Sabre's GetThere corporate self-booking subsidiary this week announced a new solution backed by AgentWare, a different screen-scraping provider
(BTN, March 10).
According to an AA statement, the carrier "filed suit against FareChase in July after repeated requests to stop searching aa.com were ignored, in violation of the terms and conditions of the Web site." The airline complained that, "among other harms, the FareChase software hurts the company's ability to offer Web fares as an incentive to use lower cost distribution systems," referring to its EveryFare program
(BTN, Feb. 10). "The Web fares found on aa.com are widely available to the public and are not private property," countered FareChase senior vice president Krista Pappas. "We firmly believe that once the airlines post their airfares publicly, consumers have the right to use comparison shopping tools. This temporary injunction is a setback, but we are going to aggressively fight it."
Other air carriers including Southwest Airlines
(BTN, Sept. 23, 2002) have considered action on screen scrapers and are paying close attention to the litigation. "We're watching AA-FareChase with great interest," said Bill Brunger, vice president of distribution planning and revenue decision support at Continental Airlines. "We get to choose who uses our information and how. We have stopped people from scraping, but we have also licensed other people to scrape."