statement
 

 

COALITION DENOUNCES CRS DEREGULATION PROPOSAL

Consumer Travel Choices To Be Restricted

Corporations’ data privacy protections at great risk!

BRUSSELS 12 December 2005-The Business Travel Coalition (BTC) today deplored as misguided a scheme by some in the European Commission to quietly eliminate the time-tested CRS Code of Conduct: rules assuring European consumers and corporate purchasers of having abundant and unbiased choices of travel services alternatives, and the affordable prices that result from effective competition. Very importantly, the current Code prohibits CRSs from enabling, through MIDT tape distribution to airlines, the identification of corporate purchasers; this vital protection is now at great risk! (See 2002 EC communiqué here.)

Mike Perkin, Manager, EMEA Travel, at Cisco Systems’ UK headquarters stated, ”The current rules have worked exceptionally well to ensure that corporations have optimal levels of content; adequate competition among CRSs; minimal barriers to entry for low-cost and network new-entrant airlines; and unbiased travel management companies. To abandon these rules would represent a major setback for travel industry competition and buyer and seller efficiencies resulting in greater complexity and cost for all participants.”

Since 1989, virtually all travel reservations in Europe have been governed by these rules that were emplaced because of the structural incentives and actual anti-competitive and anti-consumer abuses by CRSs and their airline owners. The rules guarantee fair access to reservations in Europe for consumers. (See BTC Commentary in the European Edition of the Wall Street Journal.) As determined in a 29 June 2005 BTC CRS Conference in Brussels, the only beneficiaries of elimination of the rules would be Lufthansa, AirFrance-KLM, Iberia, and Amadeus, the CRS that they jointly own and effectively control.