620 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM development of the low-cost companies and ICTs, started to generate notorious losses to transporters. Therefore, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) intended to recapture control over it, but also to achieve a substantial reduction in costs and commissions going to agents and intermediaries. Until 2010, these costs amounted to more than 15% of their total sales, also generating missed opportunities and preventing airlines from directly offering their own products at a lower cost than the GDS themselves. Moreover, a new concept began to be developed under this scenario: NDC, envisaging the tourist as an active party. The development of this model assumes a more important role for airlines and lends a greater flexibility to the generation of profits by optimizing the products provided to the client. III.2. Characteristics of the NDC The NDC is based on the need of sharing information between the parties, with all its transactions being carried out in real time, intelligently making it possible to share information with the client, as well as knowing the client’s preferences. It also implies savings in emission costs (the current average price paid to GDS is 12 US$ per ticket per leg), as well as performing real-time comparisons that make it possible to directly know the selection of seats, meals and other preferences. In conclusion, airlines intend to recover the GDS inventories, seeking a democratisation and generating a new flow chart, known as the NewDistribution Capability. III.3. Recent Legal Actions Filed Against GDSs / Travelport / Sabre / Amadeus by a Group of Consumers in the USA Recently, consumers exposed certain economic practices and economic concentrations of the GDSs that, while being detrimental to airlines, also indirectly worked to the disadvantage of final consumers, who were deprived of the possibility of having access to superior products in better conditions through the airlines themselves. The lawsuit was based on the following grounds: a) That GDSs infringed the rules on competition to impose the airlines’ higher tariffs for tourists. b) That they incurred in anti-competitive behaviours, such as building a plan to restrain airlines from negotiating GDS prices and offer differentiated
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