American Airlines and Sabre to face-off in new court case
American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth) has filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against Sabre Airline Solutions, seeking a temporary injunction preventing its long-time global distribution system (GDS) from rolling out its “New Airline Storefront” display product to travel agencies, claiming it favours Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson).
The suit in the District Court in Tarrant County, Texas, is aimed at barring Sabre from using Storefront and rolling it out to travel agencies through its Sabre Red 360 product, or to corporate customers through its GetThere product, or any other product. American argues it will suffer “irreparable harm that cannot be fully compensated with money damages” due to the Sabre product. It seeks a temporary injunction pending a full trial, upon which it requests a permanent injunction against Sabre rolling out the product as planned from July 2021.
In the court filing, American charges the new display favours Delta’s products over its own, despite American having been Sabre’s largest client for decades. It alleges that Sabre’s new value-based booking fee model provides travel agents/ corporate travel management companies (TMCs) with inaccurate and misleading information about American’s products, services, fares, schedules, and inventory.
It claims further contract breach in terms that Sabre intends to pay added incentives to travel agencies who book higher-priced Delta fares than for comparable American fares, which it says, will disadvantage American at a time when business travel is recovering after COVID-19.
American says it has repeatedly raised its concerns with Sabre and has asked it to pause the product roll-out until these issues are fixed, but Sabre has refused to do so.
The airline says Sabre developed “Storefront” in collaboration with Delta and alleges the product is aimed at frustrating efforts by American and other airlines to implement new data transmission standards that allow airlines to offer dynamic, detailed content to travel agents that are otherwise only available on the airlines’ own websites.
Sabre was not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes after Sabre and Delta in May announced the creation of the New Airline Storefront as a “transformative global distribution agreement”.
In 2016, American won USD15.3 million following a lengthy antitrust lawsuit against Sabre for charging grossly inflated booking fees. American was suing under the name of US Airways (US, Phoenix Sky Harbor), the carrier it merged with in 2013. US Airways had filed the lawsuit in 2011.
Sabre was founded by American in 1960 as its own reservation system before growing so large that it was spun off in 2000 to start servicing the broader travel industry, including hotels and car rental firms.