Next Thursday (September 20th), the Business Travel Coalition (BTC) is holding a meeting in Brussels over the planned de-regulation of the CRSs in Europe.
This meeting will be the last major chance for the travel industry to spell out its fears over the form this de-regulation seems to be taking.
The meeting, organised by Kevin Mitchell of the BTC, will be attended by about 125 delegates from GDSs, airlines, travel associations and TMCs. There will also be representatives from the UK and Dutch competition authorities and officials from the EC Directorate General Transport and Energy (DG Tren).
It is the EC people whose apparent re-thinking has led to what many see in the industry as a potential disaster.
Until this spring, plans to de-regulate the CRSs in Europe were proceeding smoothly if slowly.
After reports and consultations, DG Tren was apparently going to suggest that the 1989 CRS Code of Conduct in Europe should be updated and modified but with one essential proviso.
Because three airlines, Air France, Lufthansa and Iberia, had between them a 46.4% stake in Amadeus, one of the leading GDSs, safeguards should be built in to prevent any abuse of this situation. The concept of mandatory participation – that all GDSs must carry the inventory of all airlines – was maintained. It was a common sense solution widely accepted by the industry.
However the story began to leak out - BTE first carried it in May - that lawyers at DG Tren were beginning to question whether the three airlines were "parent carriers" of Amadeus.
GEBTA's legal adviser Isabelle Leroy told BTE: "If the lawyers decide they are not parent carriers, the obligation regarding mandatory participation falls."
The prospect of this opened up unwelcome scenarios of GDSs picking and choosing which carriers's inventory to display and what prominence to give it. There were obvious areas of potential abuse.
In countries like France and Spain where Amadeus and, respectively, Air Fracne and Iberia, were pre-eminent, would not that “double dominance” amount to a virtual monopoly which excluded other GDS, like Sabre and Galileo.
One industry insider with 25 years' experience on the regulatory side side told BTE: "I have been consistently of the view that so long as large carriers have ownership stakes in CRSs, it is perilous to de-regulate the industry entirely.
"I know that that anytime an airline owns an interest in a GDS, they have a natural incentive to favour that GDS over all others and that GDSs will do the same."
He said there must be four core criteria as long as airlines have a stake in a GDS.
These are:
1. Airlines that have a stake at any level in a GDS must particpate with competing GDSs – this is bedrock.
2. Airlines owners can not pay commission on services to users which only go through the GDS in which they have a stake. It must be paid to all.
3. Displays of airline inventories should be neutral regardless of ownership.
4. Services offered by a GDS must be available on the same basis to all airlines.
Despite protest letters and general industry unease, little has emerged from DG Tren either as to what it is doing or, just as importantly, why it is having this apparent late change of mind. Its thinking has remained tightly guarded.
However BTE's source said that the current regulations refer to a parent carrier as one which "owns or controls" a GDS. He said the current DG Tren thinking was that it should be an airline which “owns and controls" a GDS.
"When I heard that, I thought I had been told the earth was flat. There is just no way that the rules have ever been interpreted to say that,” he said.
Certainly Amadeus has been lobbying for the DR Tren to declare that its three airline stakeholders are not "parent carriers."
But others have been lobbying too, like C-FARE, the organisation based in Brussels, backed by airlines and Sabre and set up specifically to persuade the EC to maintain safeguards as long as any carrier has a strake in a GDS.
Hopefully some of the thinking of the DG Tren will emerge at next week's meeting. Answers are needed to see how endorsing "double dominance" of Amadeus and one owner airline in a country fits in with the EC's supposedly tough anti-trust regulations.
If Ryanair can not take over a relatively small carrier like Aer Lingus because of fears of a monopoly, how on earth can the EC allow a situation where an airline and a GDS with which it is strongly linked be allowed unchallengeable dominance?
These are real fears DG Tren needs to address. If there is a good, persuasive case for saying that Air France, Lufthansa and Iberia are not "parent carriers", the industry needs to hear it.
But if that is the case, the industry will also want to know what plans DG Tren has to prevent any abuses which might arise from its new ruling.