We all know that Greece has been conducting a long and dangerous flirtation with the IMF and other financial institutions about its intentions to deal with its debt crisis. There are worse ways to understand the airlines' attempt to deal with distribution fees than to look at some of the market clues as to whether or not Greece will default.
We all have different barometers by which we judge how things are going: the weather forecast, the Premier League table and the FTSE being a few examples.
FTSE watchers will have noticed that the index of leading UK shares started to head south about a month ago but took a sharp turn upwards at the beginning of this week. The reason was a confidence by the markets that the Greeks would resolve their financial crisis in a way which ensured that they would stay in the EU and the euro rather than exit.
Similarly, members of the business travel fraternity might have noticed the change in Amadeus's share price since June 2nd (the date on which Lufthansa announced its new commercial strategy) when it was 41.39. On June 3rd it was 37.36, a drop of 10%. It has hovered at this level ever since – in other words, markets think that the Lufthansa initiative might wound Amadeus but not mortally.
The real issue is who and what influences corporate decisions. Alexis Tsipras's Syriza party was elected on an anti-austerity platform. It consulted the voters but the big players in the final decision are not Greek voters.
In the same way, after the Premier League was formed and money flowed in, a number went public and their constituency went beyond supporters to shareholders.
The big airlines of the world are no longer owned by governments. They are publicly traded companies and while the world's stock markets have recovered since 2010, the airlines – especially Lufthansa and Air France with their onerous labour contracts – have not flourished like other sectors.
Source: Scott Gillespie, tClara
The GDSes are similarly no longer owned by the airlines. They are now publicly traded companies whose investment decisions are no longer determined by what helps aviation distribution; the criteria is now return on capital.
And how about football clubs? The massive TV receipts prompted more UK clubs than any of us can remember to try to go public. In fact it was a miscalculation – the money didn't go to shareholders or supporters; it's gone to players in a world where the success of the players will determine the success of the business.
At risk of upsetting a number of readers, it's worth reading what Daniel Levy, chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, view of a football club being a plc: "The business model of any football club is so dependent on what happens on the pitch and that is something the management can't have a direct impact on, so it's not a model the institutions support."
The airlines no longer own the GDS. That has many benefits. But it also makes for many challenges.
The question of surcharges for booking via the GDS has yet to be resolved but there are worse places to look for hints of what's happening than the annual reports of the principals.