The friction has intensified since around 2012, as more airlines began offering à la carte services, like priority boarding, extra-legroom seats, meals, in-flight Wi-Fi, and baggage fees. Sabre’s software is not always the most flexible, though, which can be frustrating for airlines. The attempt to acquire Farelogix, these lawyers write in their complaint, is also an attempt to stamp out competition. (Sabre spun off from American Airlines about a decade later, and is now a publicly traded company valued at $6.4 billion.) More recently, government lawyers say, Sabre has “resisted innovation” and charged airlines and customers high prices for its middleman products. Sabre has been around forever-well, since the 1960s, when executives at American Airlines wanted to build an automated reservation system for booking flights. The lawsuit, brought last month in Delaware, would prevent Sabre from acquiring the newer Florida-based travel tech company Farelogix, for $360 million. So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that the US Department of Justice filed suit last month to prevent Sabre from acquiring a competitor. But airlines complain that the US industry leader, Sabre, is opaque, frustrating, and sometimes slow-moving. Airline-booking software is the kind of back-office technology that seems like the last thing to attract the attention of antitrust regulators.
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