Lufthansa Ratchets Up Pressure on Sabre Over Travel Distribution
Photo Credit: Judges on the Supreme Court of Texas walk into the courtroom to hear oral arguments in a case between Lufthansa Group and Sabre. Supreme Court of Texas
Skift Take
This year Lufthansa made a series of small moves that, when looked at together, reveal a doubling down on its multi-front strategy to pressure Amadeus, Travelport, and especially Sabre to conform more to its preferred airline distribution practices. Connect the dots, and it looks like a low-grade war.
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer," said Peter Drucker, the late king of the management gurus. In that vein, travel technology companies told airlines to "make customers, not war."
But Lufthansa Group hasn't listened.
This year it has fought the tech companies by withdrawing some content from them, introducing incentives to agents who bypass them, and pursuing in Texas state court compensation this fall for a separate set of fees it doesn't believe one of those middlemen, Sabre, should charge it.
Since the summer of 2015, Lufthansa Group has fought a low-grade war on the main distributors of its airline content to travel agencies, namely, Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport. Lufthansa Group added an $18 (€16) surcharge on tickets booked through the tech middlemen. The airline group claimed the middlemen were hindering it from wooing new passengers and selling more effectively to the flyers it already serves. The companies disagreed.
In January, the airline
