Airline passengers and travel agents filed an
antitrust lawsuit against American Airlines, Delta and United, alleging that
the three carriers conspired to inflate fares for multicity itineraries in the
U.S.
The lawsuit, which included more than 40 plaintiffs,
was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. It included the
Airline Tariff Publishing Co. (ATPCO) as a defendant.
The complaint alleges that starting April 1, the three
carriers conspired to enact pricing policies in which multi-leg itineraries
were priced much higher than if the customer bought each leg separately as
one-way tickets.
“Plaintiffs are now required to expend an inordinate
amount of time booking individual one-way legs of multicity flights in order to
save their customers hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of dollars they
would otherwise be required to pay as a result of the airline defendants’ price
fix,” the complaint reads. “In many cases, the time required to book the
identical multicity trip has increased from approximately five minutes to 20
minutes or more by reason of the need to enter full data sets for each
passenger on each one-way leg and obtain a Personal Name Report (“PNR”) for
each leg. This is a time-consuming process for which plaintiffs cannot be
compensated.”
Additionally, the carriers enacted more restrictions
that “eliminated the ‘combinability’ of lower, nonrefundable, one-way fares,”
further boosting ticket prices, according to the complaint.
ATPCO was included as a defendant because “it aids,
abets and enables its airline owners, including the airline defendants, to fix
prices on airfares,” the complaint reads.
American, Delta and United account for more than 70%
of revenue from U.S. airline passengers, according to the complaint.
American said the plaintiffs' claims were
"completely without merit."
“We recently made a
unilateral change to our fare rules to ensure that new lower fares we
introduced would be available to passengers flying the route for which the
fares were intended. In doing so we eliminated what was, in effect, a loophole
in the fare rules that allowed some people to construct connections that
combined two nonstop fares,” said American Airlines spokesman Casey Norton.
United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said, “We strongly disagree
with the contention that United’s recent changes in its fare rule are a result of illegal coordination. The combinability
rule had permitted connecting customers to circumvent United’s inventory
controls and combine the two one-way fares into the same ticket, resulting in
prices that were different than what United intended for the connecting
itinerary. United changed fare rules to disallow these unintended fare
combinations.”