568 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM (ii) to assess whether the pro-competitive benefits produced by the agreement outweigh restrictive effects on competition. If we refer to the first limb of the assessment, it may be concluded that an agreement for the development, operation and use of a common standard in the air tickets retailing market, such as NDC, would certainly restrict competition as such. It should be borne in mind that NDC is a travel industry supported programme. According to IATA, with NDC, airlines will respond to requests sent by travel agents and will be able to construct, store and manage product offers to agents. On the other hand, according to travel agents, the standard put in place by IATA may give rise to restrictive effects on competition by potentially limiting fare transparency and price comparison. Indeed, because of this new approach (airlines individualised response to a travel request), travel agents fear that content and fare will not be made public anymore, with a risk of creating discriminatory fares. Nevertheless, there is no anti-competitive agreement when it is possible to find pro-competitive benefits to this (this is the second limb of the assessment): – First, NDC should offer to all approved channels full access to the airlines’ content in a single point of access; – NDC should not be mandatory; – NDC can be integrated into existing processes and systems – e.g. GDS are integrating NDC in their own system for compatibility purposes; and – NDC will enable to focus on the personalisation of offers to passengers (“digital real-time offers”). At first sight, it is doubtful whether NDC would lead to an anti-competitive effect on the airline distribution market, in the sense that a significant part of sales tickets is still made through travel agents. Apart from privacy issues, it appears that the EU is quite favourable to NDC deployment. There are signs that the NDC standard would not be seen, as such, as affecting competition in the single market. Indeed, for instance, in the European Parliament resolution of 11 November 2015 on aviation12 the Parliament invited the Commission to take measures to improve competitiveness 12 2015/2933(RSP).
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