Brussels, 25/06/2002 (Agence Europe) - Having consulted the parties concerned, the Commission adopted a regulation that renews, until 30 June 2005, the block exemption for passenger tariff conferences of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The European Executive considers that a less restrictive system would not offer more advantageous prices for consumers. So far, airline companies operating within the EU benefited from block exemptions enabling them to consult on scheduled passenger tariffs, as long as long as these tariffs were for interlining (when a passenger is carried for part or all of his journey by an airline other than the one he booked with). In practice, the exemption applied only to IATA activities, which organises passenger tariff conferences several times a year to set interlining tariffs for all the regions of the world, and in which all flag carriers in the EEA and a number of regional airlines participate. By granting that exemption, the Commission had considered at the time that, although a restriction to competition in that it involves price setting, these conferences procured economic advantages to the benefit of passengers, like, for example, the application of promotional tariffs for certain cities.
In February 2001, the Commission initiated a consultation with Member states, airline companies, travel agencies and consumer associations on whether the block exemption for consultations on passenger tariffs should be maintained in its current form after 30 June 2002, date of its expiry. It emerged from the consultation that IATA tariff conferences provided great advantages, especially for interlining services for passenger transport, and that it was not very likely that another system, less restrictive, may be just as advantageous. Prohibiting these conferences would, on the contrary, reduce the choice of products on offer and render competition more difficult for small airline companies by limiting their possibilities of interlining. However, so as to facilitate the review of a future renewal of the exemption, the Commission made this renewal dependent on the gathering of concrete data on the actual use of tariffs agreed so as to determine to what extent agreements on price setting are justified in a market increasingly dominated by global alliances between airline companies.