The nation’s largest airlines are in hot water for allegedly sharing nonpublic fare information with one another, consequently suppressing competition and artificially raising ticket prices. A proposed class action lawsuit filed by two travelers on Wednesday in federal district court in Seattle accused seven major airlines, as well as data clearinghouse the Airline Tariff Publishing Company, ...

Customers line up to board Alaska's inaugural trans-Pacific flight to Tokyo at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on May 12, 2025, in SeaTac, Washington.

Kevin Clark/The Seattle Times/TNS

The nation’s largest airlines are in hot water for allegedly sharing nonpublic fare information with one another, consequently suppressing competition and artificially raising ticket prices.

A proposed class action lawsuit filed by two travelers on Wednesday in federal district court in Seattle accused seven major airlines, as well as data clearinghouse the Airline Tariff Publishing Company, or ATPCO, and its subsidiary 3Victors, of violating federal antitrust laws.

The practice of sharing pricing data is not new, and many major airlines have worked with ATPCO for decades. But, the lawsuit alleges, the platform has recently begun tracking nonpublic, individualized discounts, and, using AI-driven tools from 3Victors, offering fare tracking in real time instead of daily reports.

The change began in 2023, the lawsuit claims, when ATPCO rolled out a data repository that allowed airlines to view competitors’ data in return for sharing their own. The company paired that with a monitoring tool that would alert airlines when rivals cut their price on a competing ticket, the lawsuit alleges.

Steve Berman, an attorney with Seattle-based Hagens Berman law firm, which filed the litigation, said the participating airlines can see “in real time what everyone is charging for any route in the U.S.”

“They’re basically eliminating independent competition,” he said in an interview with The Seattle Times Thursday.

ATPCO, based in Herndon, Va., could not be reached for comment this week. On its website, the company bills its services as a way for airlines to “get the right offer to the right customer at the right time.” It also says that it is “owned by the airlines” and lists several major carriers, domestic and international, on a list titled Board of Directors.

ATPCO does not publicly list its customers.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday named seven major U.S. carriers: Delta, United, American, Alaska, Hawaiian, Southwest and JetBlue. Most of those airlines either declined to comment on pending litigation or could not be reached this week.

A spokesperson for American denied the claims asserted in the lawsuit.

We operate in a highly competitive industry that has delivered tremendous value to consumers, and we take compliance with antitrust laws very seriously," the spokesperson said in a statement. "We develop and price our products independently, compete every day to win customers and categorically reject any suggestion that our prices are anything other than independent and competitive.

The proposed class action was filed on behalf of two travelers, California resident Ashley Ward and New Jersey resident Gregory Morris, who allege they paid artificially inflated fares because of the airlines’ “unlawful conduct,” according to court records.

According to the compliant, ATPCO launched a working group in 2016 to study “dynamic pricing,” or the trend of offering nonpublic discounts tailored to specific travelers. The company worried that the personalized offers, which could go undetected by competitors, would disrupt the usual order of the airline industry, which had for decades publicly shared fare data.

That traditional model disincentivized carriers from making deep discounts because their rivals could simply match the price, kicking off a so-called “race to the bottom,” the lawsuit alleged.

By 2023, ATPCO and its new subsidiary 3Victors had rolled out tools to track dynamic pricing and make it available in the same way as other fare data, the complaint said. It set up its data repository as a “give to get model,” where airlines that shared their information would then be able to access competitors’ data “in proportion to what it contributes,” according to the complaint.

Airlines using the tools and platform had access to more market information than a competitor, or the general public, could obtain by watching the market, the lawsuit alleged.

That practice is in opposition to 1994 consent decrees stemming from a Department of Justice lawsuit against ATPCO and eight major airlines, Wednesday’s filing continued. Those decrees, which all expired by 2011, prevented airlines from sharing nonpublic information to control pricing across the board. In essence, it held airlines to gather only the competitive data that a travel agent selling a ticket to a passenger could also access.

Now, “by building a system of private data that shows each airline when a rival has gone lower, the defendants have successfully rebuilt what the government dismantled thirty years ago,” attorneys for the travelers wrote in Wednesday’s lawsuit.

The litigation comes as ticket prices are soaring, which airlines have attributed to skyrocketing jet fuel prices amid the Iran war. Over the past year, airline executives have said those high ticket prices are likely here to stay, as airlines work to recover from the costly year and increasingly cater to passengers willing to pay more for premium experiences.

The proposed class action lawsuit seeks to represent passengers who purchased a ticket for domestic travel from Southwest, Alaska, JetBlue or United in the past four years. The lawsuit alleges Delta and Hawaiian, the two other carriers listed as defendants, are connected to ATPCO and the company’s board that approved the data-sharing repository.

Berman said he expects to amend the complaint to include Delta ticket holders in the future.