Travel buyer representatives met the European Commission in Brussels today to mount a rearguard action to prevent it from fully deregulating global distribution systems in Europe. They fear deregulation could lead to the re-inclusion by GDSs of bookings made by individual companies in the marketing information data tapes they sell to airlines.
The Commission for more than three years has been considering whether to repeal its code of conduct governing GDSs. Opponents of a full repeal also claim that, unlike the United States, where deregulation took effect last year, the European market is distorted. They argue this is because Europe's leading GDS, Amadeus, is part-owned by three European airlines—Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia—leading to what is known as double dominance in their respective home markets of Germany, France and Spain.
It was widely assumed the Commission would opt for partial deregulation, which built in safeguards to deal with double dominance. However, in late October it became clear that a red-tape-cutting drive by the Commission could lead to full deregulation instead.
Since this signal of a change of heart, attention largely has focused on the double dominance issue, but now buyers are realizing they could once more find their booking data for sale to airlines if deregulation goes ahead. In 2002, the Commission wrote to GDSs asking them to mask out any MIDT data that potentially identifies clients—such as bookings through an agency implant
(BTN, June 3, 2002). This request was made on the basis of Article 6 of the code of conduct. If the code is repealed, that would theoretically remove clients' protection on this issue.
Cortas, the organization that represents one dozen of the Netherlands' largest travel buyers, discussed this issue in a meeting today with Commission officials. Far from full deregulation, it wants the Commission to adopt a recommendation that GDSs only can sell MIDT aggregated at a country level, rather than an IATA number level, and that data that is sold should be at least six months old.
"Cortas is totally opposed to letting go of the recommendations of the Brattle Group [which made the recommendations about MIDT]," said Herman Mensink, representative director for Cortas. "Corporates are saying GDSs should not be allowed to do what they want with our data. The corporate and agency lobbies have not been strong enough in pushing this issue up the agenda."
Edward Ross, director of corporate and marketing communication for Amadeus, which favors full deregulation, said of the MIDT issue: "No one knows what the Commission would rule on that. It is one of the things under discussion."
Although no date has been set, industry sources said the Commission probably would make its final decision on the code of conduct within the next three months.