Private Antitrust Enforcement in the Tourism Industry Dominik Wolski* 1. Introductory Issues; 2. Does Antitrust Law Have Something to do with the Tourism Industry?; 3. Antitrust Damages Claims in the Tourism Industry; 4. Other Consequences of Antitrust Infringements; 5. Conclusions and Recommendations; Bibliography. 1. INTRODUCTORY ISSUES The United States (US) is both the birthplace and the homeland of antitrust law. This field of law and practice has been developing intensively there at least since the beginning of the twentieth century1. Interestingly enough, unlike in the European Communities (ECs) – where from the outset we have had competition law or competition rules instead of antitrust law, which is an American phenomena2 – in the US the enforcement of antitrust law has been mostly conducted in private. As a result, antitrust damages claims have dominated the enforcement of antitrust law for years and virtually replaced public enforcement almost in its entirety. The proportion between public and private enforcement is 10% to 90% in favour of the latter, and there is not any sign that this situation will significantly change in the foreseeable future3. There are several reasons behind the aforementioned model of antitrust enforcement discussed in legal literature, however, compensation, deterrence 1 * Ph.D. in law; Assistant Professor at Katowice School of Economics, Poland; Attorney-at-law. Contact: dominik.wolski@gwsh.pl. The first American antitrust law, namely the Sherman Act was adopted on 2 July 1890 (Sherman Act), followed by the Clayton Act of 15 October 1914 (Clayton Act). See more about two meaningful pieces of the US legislation in C. A. Jones, Private Enforcement of Antitrust Law in the EU, UK and USA, Oxford 1999, pp. 8-11 and C. D. Floyd, E. T. Sullivan, Private Antitrust Actions, The Structure and Process of Civil Antitrust Litigation, Little, Brown and Company 1996, pp. 2-13. 2 See C. A. Jones, Private Enforcement …, pp. 3-5. In this paper antitrust and competition law are both used with no particular differentiation in their meaning. 3 See C. A. Jones, Private Enforcement …, pp. 16.
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