Airlines accused of sharing pricing data to inflate fares
Lily Roby
(CN) — Seven major airlines used a shared database to monitor each other’s prices, curbing competition and driving up the cost of domestic air travel, two airline passengers claim in a proposed class action.
Ashley Ward and Gregory Morris sued the airlines, Airline Tariff Publishing Company and its subsidiary 3Victors on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The plaintiffs claim the companies conspired to exchange confidential pricing information in violation of federal antitrust law.
The airline defendants include American, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska, Hawaiian and JetBlue. Ward says she bought tickets from Southwest while Morris purchased flights from United, and both claim they paid artificially inflated fares.
At the center of the lawsuit are two products operated by 3Victors: Iris, an airline shopping and pricing data aggregator, and PriceEye, an analytics tool that lets airlines monitor competitors’ fares and pricing changes.
The plaintiffs say airlines contribute shopping data and dynamically generated prices to Iris in exchange for access to PriceEye. The dashboard provides pricing alerts, competitive benchmarks and tools to detect unusual changes, allowing airlines to track rivals’ pricing in near real time.
The arrangement operates on a “give-to-get” model. “Participation in Iris is based on a simple principle: the more you contribute, the more you receive,” the plaintiffs say.
Ward and Morris say the system undermines the secrecy that dynamic pricing was supposed to bring to airline ticket sales. Airlines can use individualized offers to compete for customers, but sharing that information with competitors makes it easier to monitor and respond to price cuts.
3Victors advertises that PriceEye lets airlines “confidently monitor the competitive landscape and adjust pricing strategies as markets shift — hour by hour, not day by day,” the plaintiffs say in the complaint.
They trace the arrangement to a working group called Airline Tariff Publishing Company, or ATPCO, formed in 2016 to study dynamic pricing. A study presented at an industry conference the following year illustrated how airlines unable to monitor one another’s private offers could engage in price wars, driving fares down.
ATPCO subsequently developed a system to standardize dynamic pricing data and began collecting airlines’ shopping information. The company announced a program in 2023 that allowed airlines to analyze collective shopping data, and it acquired 3Victors later that year.
By 2025 and 2026, the plaintiffs say, ATPCO had integrated the technology into Iris and PriceEye, creating a system that allowed participating airlines to exchange and analyze sensitive pricing information.
The plaintiffs, represented by Steve W. Berman of Hagens Berman, seek to represent classes of domestic airline ticket purchasers. They want the court to block the information-sharing arrangement and award damages.