Correction in the Wall Street Journal

From: "readersfeedback@wsj.com"
To: Edward hasbrouck
Subject: FW: correction re: US-UK flights
Date sent: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 12:43:19 -0400

Thank you for e-mailing The Wall Street Journal. Below is the correction we ran on 3/21/07.

"While British Airways is one of four U.S. and United Kingdom carriers allowed to fly between London's Heathrow Airport and the U.S., carriers from other nations do fly the routes with special permission from the U.S. and U.K. Articles on March 3 and March 6 about a trans-Atlantic open-skies treaty incorrectly said that British Airways was one of only four airlines permitted to fly from Heathrow to the U.S.

(See: "Politics & Economics: U.S. and the EU Reach Draft Open-Skies Deal" -- WSJ March 3, 2007 and "Corporate Focus: British Airways Chief Blasts Open-Skies Plan --- Broughton Says Treaty Favors U.S.; Heathrow Jammed?" -- WSJ March 6, 2007)"

The Journal's correction was in reponse to my letter, as below. While they corrected the factual error in their news stories, their correction failed to note that they had cited the same "fact" as part of the basis for their editorial in support of the the so-called "open skies" aviation treaty between the USA and the European Union, which the Journal continues to support.

From: Edward Hasbrouck
To: "wsj.ltrs@wsj.com"
Subject: correction re: US-UK flights
Date sent: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:59:43 -0700

In a news story on March 6 (print edition, p. A12) and again in your editorial March 8 ("Liberating Heathrow") on a proposed "open-skies" treaty between the U.S. and the U.K., you refer to "British Airways' grip over its Heathrow hub, from which it is one of four airlines permitted
to fly to the U.S."

In fact, six airlines operated scheduled nonstop service between Heathrow and the U.S.

In addition to the four airlines mentioned in your article, Air India (typically the price leader on the route, especially in business and first class) operates daily nonstop service between Heathrow and JFK Airport in New York, as well as nonstop service between Heathrow and O'Hare Airport in Chicago. And Kuwait Airways (also with lower prices and generally better service than its U.S.- or U.K.-based competitors) operates nonstop service between Heathrow and JFK.

In carrying "fifth freedom" traffic between third countries, these airlines are doing the same thing U.S.-based airlines do when they undercut Japanese carriers on local routes between Japan and other countries in Asia.

Edward Hasbrouck

I'll have a more detailed analysis of the implications (mostly negative) for travellers of the proposed "Open Skies treaty in a future column.

The Amazing Race 11 (All-Star Edition), Episode 6

Maputo (Mozambique) - Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) - Stone Town, Zanzibar (Tanzania) - Kikungwi, Zanzibar (Tanzania) - Stone Town, Zanzibar (Tanzania)

I said last week that I'd talk about the markets of Maputo, Mozambique, before the teams on The Amazing Race moved on.

I have fond memories of those markets from my visit in 2005. They range from the relatively upscale Central Market downtown in what William Finnegan says Mozambicans call the "cement city", where some of the racers went (a great place to find the Mozambican national snack, hot cashews roasted to order), to places like the street market at Xipamanine, where we went in search of African fabrics and clothing. The shirt I found there was made in Nigeria, not Mozambique, so the vendor told us in our limited mutual language of pigeon Portuguese. But when I got back, and someone tried the pickup line, "That's a great shirt! Where did you get it?", there was a certain cachet in being able to answer, "I got it in a street market in a slum in Maputo, Mozambique."

Despite Mozambique's poverty, lack of infrastructure, and relatively recent history on the receiving end of a war that received little attention abroad (despite the role played by the USA in backing the South African aparthied government and its proxies), Maputo seemed much less emotionally traumatized than South Africa, and made me want to return to explore more of the country.

But the racers left Mozambique without another chance to see anything of Maputo, much less to get out of the capital.

I was in Brussels at the European Union and wasn't able to watch this episode of the race until I got home. Since almost all of this episode of the race -- and the following one -- related to airline routes and flight availability, I'll talk about the issues in both episodes together next week .

European Parliament hearing on PNR's

I'm off to Brussels for this hearing on Monday (agenda , additional background documents ) on the transfer of passenger name record (PNR) data from the European union to the USA, and for a meeting of the "Article 29 Working Party" of E.U. national data protection authorities on the same topics.

I hope to be able to raise some of the issues I've written about here , here , and here related to the lack of adequate protection (against access by the government, commercial misuse and redisclousure, and further transfers to other countries) for PNR data transferred to commercial entities in the USA, in routine and flagrant violation of the EU Data Protection Directive and the privacy, notice, and consent requirements of the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's.

Here's my prepared statement for the meetings.

Update: Report on the day's events (in English) from the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRi) and a German translation of the same report.

The Amazing Race 11 (All-Star Edition), Episode 5

Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) - Ushuaia (Argentina) - Maputo (Mozambique)

I'm tempted to reminisce about my experiences in the markets of Maputo, Mozambique, the scene of The Amazing Race this week.

But I'll leave that for next week. First, I have to talk about this week's airline routing challenge: getting from Ushuaia (Argentina) to Maputo.

The most direct and fastest connections, on the days when the best flights operate, involve at least three flights, two changes of planes in Buenos Aires and Johannesburg, and a transfer between the domestic and international airports in Buenos Aires. Probably because of the day of the week, the racers all ended up on the same four flights, with an additional change of planes in São Paulo. The racers left Ushuaia on day 1, and arrived in Maputo on day 3. That's the most complicated airline itinerary, and one of the longest total journey times, in any season of the race to date.

The lack of direct flights across the South Atlantic surprises many people who assume that airline route networks are equally dense, and schedules equally frequent, everywhere in the (populated) world. But because airline routes follow trade routes and money, and there is little trade between Latin America and Africa, there are only a handful of direct flights between the Mercosur countries (the "Southern Cone") and Southern Africa.

I'll never forget the inquiry I got in 1997, at the travel agency where I was then working, from someone who wanted me to give him prices for tickets on a route around the world, with each flight on an inflexible date in the year 2000 that had already been fixed (before it was even known if there would be any flights on that day), including leaving San Carlos de Bariloche (another provincial Argentine city, north of Ushuaia) and arriving in Capetown the same day. In a single day. With 250 people. All of them with bicycles, to be transported with them on the same plane(s).

The query came from a man named Tim Kneeland, who I learned was organizing a bicycle tour around the world called "Odyssey 2000". What I only later learned was that he had never organized an international event or one involving air travel, and that he had already fixed his "budget" and price before he made any attempt to find out what the air tickets (and air cargo and/or excess baggage charges for the bicycles) would cost and without having any contracts with local tour operators or firm prices for accommodations or other services in any of the countries on his planned route.

I tried to point out some of the problems in his plan, as epitomized by the "Bariloche to Capetown in a day" line on the proposed itinerary: There are no direct intercontinental flights from Ushuaia. The most direct connections would take at least an additional day, maybe two. The only plane that could carry 250 people, their luggage, and 250 bicycles is a 747. There is no scheduled 747 service to Ushuaia, and unless they chartered a plane (at substantial additional cost, including the cost of flying it empty to Ushuaia to pick them up), no airline would be likely to let them take over the entire flight to accommodate such a large group:

Mr. Kneeland's fax listed travel from Bariloche to Capetown as occurring in a single day. I pointed out that there were (and are) no scheduled intercontinental flights from Bariloche, so that the group would need to travel via Buenos Aries; that even from Buenos Aires there aren't flights to Capetown every day; that it might not be possible to accommodate the whole group on one flight even on a widebody; and that the scheduled flights from Buenos Aires to Capetown are overnight flights that arrive the following day. So I recommended that he allot at least three travel days in the schedule for this leg of the journey: I recommended he make sure that everyone had assembled at the end of the ride in Bariloche by the evening of day zero, so that you could fly to Buenos Aires on travel day one (probably distributed over several flights), so as to be able to board the flight from Buenos Aires on travel day two, to arrive in Capetown on travel day three, and to be ready to resume riding from Capetown on day four.

I made some other suggestions, such as that he cut down the number of flights in the year-long itinerary, have a second set of bicycles (so that one set could be sent ahead separately by slower, cheaper means), and allow several days for each air transfer, so that the group could be distributed between several scheduled flights and avoid the necessity for expensive one-way wide-body charter flights.

I also offered to investigate prices of charter flights, if Mr. Kneeland was really insistent on his proposed itinerary (he was) and was prepared to start putting down nonrefunable deposits with airlines (he wasn't, even though I later learned that he was already accepting nonrefundable deposits from prospective Odyssey 2000 riders).

It's not unusual to contact a travel agent early in the planning process, and with plans that turn out to be unrealistic for reasons an inexperienced world traveller wouldn't realize. But what really set Mr. Kneeland apart from the crowd was his refusal to listen to what I, or anyone else he consulted, tried to tell him.

When Mr. Kneeland decided not to utilize my services, I assumed that would be the last I'd ever hear of him or "Odyssey 2000". No such luck. The saga of Odyssey 2000 would haunt me -- and, even more, the participants -- for years.

As an expert on around-the-world travel, I was interviewed about the plans for Odyseey 2000 for a preview of the tour on pages 16-19 of the November/December 1998 issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine. I talked about some of my concerns about whether the tour operator ("Tim Kneeland and Associates") had enough experience with group airfares or international operations (their previous tours were all land tours in the USA) to take on such a large, such a complex, and above all such an international undertaking.

Once the story appeared in print, I began hearing from prospective riders who were already beginning to have doubts about whether they would get what they had paid for -- in spite of continuing to be excited (as I would be) at the thought of bicycling around the world.

Once the ride began. the news just kept getting worse, with tragic inevitability. With no local operators under contract, and a grossly inadequate advance staff ahead of the ride's arrival, logistics often broke down or the riders arrived to find no reservations. The schedule had to be modified to accommodate spreading the group out between multiple flights, since they and their bicycles wouldn't all fit on any one plane smaller than a 7474 -- even an L-1011 widebody .

As I expected, the leg from provincial Argentina to South Africa proved among the most problematic. According to records I eventually reviewed as an expert witness in an arbitration, Mr. Kneeland ended up paying US$500,000 to charter a 747 to carry the group and their bikes from Bariloche to Capetwon. Odyssey 2000 riders said they were told it was the first 747 ever seen at Bariloche airport, and it still had to stop in Buenos Aires to refuel. At that, the price was a bargain: the 747 was chartered on a one-way basis from a sheikh who had piloted it himself as his private plane to go falconing in Patagonia, and was happy to get partial payment toward flying it (and himself, and his falcons, and the Odyssey 200 riders, and their bicycles) back towards his home in Qatar by way of South Africa.

But Odyssey 200 started out around the world with neither airline tickets nor contractual commitments for prices of air transportation. Even with luck like meeting the sheikh, one-way charter flights proved, as I had predicted, hugely more expensive per person than airfare on scheduled airlines.

Tim Kneeland and Associates ran out of money part way through the year, and those riders who didn't want to be sent home two months early from Singapore had to pay an extra US$3,000 in (entirely foreseeable) airfare charges to complete the originally advertised itinerary. The bicycles didn't make it to some of the places on the route, even for those who paid the extra airfare. The "riders" were taken by bus from campsite to campsite to campsite in Japan, along the originally intended ride route. For more of the tragicomic (yet, for many riders, inspiring, and empowering) details, see these follow-up stories in Outside and Adventure Cyclist magazines, and this collection of rider comments and other documents assembled by Matt Newcomb, who took a year off from his regular job in Antarctica to go on the tour (and who wants his $36,000 back ).

After the riders got home, several of them took their claims against Tim Kneeland and associates to arbitration, and I was called as both a material and an expert witness. (See the declarations here and here ).

Eventually, Tim Kneeland and Associates went bankrupt, and all of its assets including its business names and trademarks were awarded to the claimant in one of the arbitrations. He didn't expect to get any money for them, but hoped that this would keep Mr. Kneeland and his company out of the business of operating tours.

No such luck: As typically happens when tour operators and other travel companies go bust, Mr. Kneeland is back in business under a new name. He refers to "closing Tim Kneeland and Associates", not mentioning that it was liquidated by order of the bankruptcy court. And he still lists the Odyssey 2000 fiasco proudly on his resume .

Many of the riders are glad they took part in Odyssey 200, and many give credit to Tim Kneeland for inspring and empowering them to do it. Whether or not they would do it again, they are entitled to be proud of themselves and the community which they formed for themselves (no thanks to the "organizers").

The lesson, perhaps, is, "Do it -- but caveat emptor".

The Amazing Race 11 (All-Star Edition), Episode 4

Petrohué (Chile) - Puerto Montt (Chile) - Punta Arenas (Chile) - Ushuaia (Argentina) - Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)

Navigation is one of the few major challenges that real-world travel around the world and The Amazing Race consistently have in common. This week, the racers were given a compass, a map, and a destination (a building, although they didn't know whether it was a well-known one), and had to find their way to that destination through the central business district of Punta Arenas. Independent travellers who aren't being led everywhere by a tour guide face challenges like this every day. For the sake of reality the racers ought to have a major challenge like this at least once every season, although so far as I can recall this was only the second time in eleven seasons, and the first for any of these contestants.

This season's cast of racers made the typical compass-reading mistakes I talked about in the first season, when the racers (including Team Guido) were in the desert in Tunisia. Once again, some of this group followed the wrong end of the compass needle, and started out in exactly the wrong direction.

Eventually, though, they all find their way to their goal. And therein lies a lesson.

Making your way through a city as a tourist isn't like following a carefully planned wilderness orienteering course. Metal objects in your pack and on the street, and tall steel-framed buildings around you, can throw off even the best magnetic compass. Maps designed for tourists are among those most likely not to be drawn to scale, to emphasize areas the map makers think are more likely to interest tourists. That distorts compass headings as well as distances. If you are following a map in a guidebook, it was probably based on fieldwork at least a year old, more likely two, even if the book is a new edition, hot off the press. The map might be wrong, things might have changed (a new highway or construction project cutting off a pedestrian route or obliterating a former landmark), or the office or museum you are looking for might have moved to a new location, even if the building or location still exists. (In my hometown of San Francisco, for example, the Asian Art Museum has moved several miles across town to the building formerly occupied by the city's main public library.)

If the compass and the map don't seem to agree, or what you are looking for doesn't seem to be where they have led you to expect to find it, you can ask local people. The racers try that, with typical results. Most people don't know which way is "north" or "south". (That's why a compass is often invaluable, even if you know the local language.)

Some people don't understand, some people don't recognize where it is they are trying to get to, and some people think they understand and try to give directions -- although they may or may not be correct. Could you accurately, without hesitation, describe to a foreigner who knows none of the streets or landmarks, and speaks little English, every step and turn on the route to a random address on the other side of the town where you live?

Of course, you can ask more people, average their answers, and go in the direction that more people point you. But that might still be wrong. And the more people you ask, "Which way is X?", the more likely you are that, even if you are going the right way, someone will eventually misunderstand, or get it wrong, and tell you, "It's back the way you are coming from." How can you tell which person's directions (to the extent that you understand them) are correct?

Never, by the way, ask, "Is this the way to X?" In many cultures, politeness requires that the answer always be, "Yes". To answer, "No" to this or almost any question would be considered insulting, even if true. Simply saying the name of the destination usually suffices to communicate that you want to go there, and people can and will respond by pointing, or leading you, even if you don't have a common language.

No amount of compass or map reading skill, and no directions from passers by can guarantee that you won't go astray. Even if someone goes with you to lead you, there might have been a failure to communicate, or they truly might not know or might be mistaken. Everyone makes wrong turns or goes the wrong way sometimes.

Thus an essential part of the art of navigation is the ability to judge how likely you are to be on the right course, and when you need to turn around, go back, and try another course.

That's an aptitude that's very hard to obtain except through experience. It's an important ability to acquire, though, and a special case of an even more important, and more generally useful, travel skill: an accurate sense of one's own ignorance, the limitations of one's knowledge and certainty, and the likelihood that one is wrong in whatever one is thinking, especially in one's assessment of the meaning of a strange situation or phenomenon.

Humility, in other words, is an essential travel asset, even in a race.

If you're not in a hurry, the worst case if you go too far before turning around is that you will have wasted some time., while the best case is that you'll find something unexpected and enlightening or entertaining, especially if you've gotten off the normal tourist route.

If you're pressed for time, you can less afford to take that risk, so you turn around sooner. Of course, that reduces your opportunities for serendipitous surprises. Worse, the sense that you can't afford to risk making a mistake, or going too far wrong, pressures you to be less willing to trust, and quicker to doubt. Impatience and hurry are major contributors to mistrust, especially mistrust of what you are told by local people. And mistrust, in turn, tends to be reciprocated and to be the root of much mutual animosity between hosts and guests.

You don't have to trust that you'll get where you thought you wanted to go, or find what you are seeking. But trust that you'll find something, and that it might be better than what you thought you came to find. That's a lesson we all can use, wherever we go.

The Amazing Race 11 (All-Star Edition), Episode 3

San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) - Puerto Montt (Chile) - Petrohué (Chile)

When they plan their first trip around the world, most people imagine it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. By the time they get home, most of them are already thinking about doing it again.

I'm no exception, and neither are the 200-plus cast members who travelled around the world in the first 10 seasons of The Amazing Race . Despite the stresses of the race, and the limited opportunities it provides for either tourism or real learning about the world, all of those invited back for the current All-Star Edition accepted, and many others (including some of those who had already won the million-dollar grand prize in previous seasons) reportedly lobbied the television producers for a second chance to race around the world at someone else's expense -- not, presumably, for the money, but for the experience -- and complained when they weren't chosen.

Aside from the addictiveness of travel, what does this season tell us about how a second trip around the world is different from a first one? As I mentioned last week , the racers themselves appear to be making some of the same mistakes as first-time travellers. So, unfortunately, do the television producers who plan the route.

The first time around, most world travellers want to go everywhere, do everything, and "see the whole world". So they try to visit too many places in too little time. Or (less often) they deliberately plan many brief stopovers in order to find out which places they might like to go back to on subsequent trips. It's relatively uncommon, although not unknown, for such a trip to involve an extended stay in any one place: It's hard to be sure that you'll want to spend months somewhere, or that it warrants such a priority for your limited time, until you've been there and checked it out. Even if someone spends months in one country on their first trip around the world, they are typically travelling around, with no more than a couple of weeks in any one spot.

Someone who visits a dozen places on a trip around the world typically comes home with one or two of them they want to go back to for weeks or months each, and a few others that they would go out of their way to include, at least for a brief visit, if they did a similar trip, or were in that part of the world, again. They usually have a few other places they wanted to go to, or learned about en route from other travellers, but didn't get to for some reason.

Except for country collectors , the typical second or subsequent trip around the world involves a stay of several months in a place that they fell in love (or fascination) with on an earlier, shorter visit; return visits to a few previously visited places; a few places missed or passed over on earlier trips; and tastes of a few new places to see if they warrant a longer return trip. The overall pace is typically slower, the number of destinations much smaller, and the likelihood of an extended stay of months in one place much greater.

My current planning follows this pattern. My best beloved companion in life and travel has just accepted an offer of a sabbatical from her teaching job in the San Francisco public schools, and we've begun planning what will be our third trip around the world from July 2007 through July 2008.

We'll be spending several months in Argentina and Chile (hopefully including the Atacama Desert, where this leg of the race began), mainly in Buenos Aires , which we've visited before and decided we want to go back to for a longer stay. B.A. is one of the few places we've visited where we both immediately thought, We'd like to live here. Now, with a year to travel, we're going to make it happen.

We also plan to spend a couple of months in China, where we passed through quickly on our first and a subsequent trip -- unsure what it would be like, or if we would want to return -- but have since concluded it warrants the time for more leisurely exploration of more of the country and the ways it is changing. (If you only visit new places, you never get to see how places change over time.)

We might stop, at least briefly, in some other places we've been before, such as in the Gulf where we enjoyed the food, shopping, and conversation during a brief stopover a couple of years ago.

Of course we want to go some places we haven't been before, such as a series of cities across southern Europe and into Turkey including Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseille, and Istanbul. We don't feel we have to see everything on this trip, though, and that influences our planning. For example, Brazil is too big and diverse to "do" ( a tourist term of horrible connotations, if you think about it) in a couple of weeks, but that should be long enough for us to judge whether we want to come back for a longer visit.

Where are you going? Where do you want to go? How long do you want to spend there?

Your mileage may vary, of course, but it's likely to be substantially shorter on your second or a subsequent trip around the world than on a first trip of similar duration.

None of these real-world patterns are yet reflected in the itinerary of The Amazing Race: All-Star Edition . Other than the airports in Miami (an often unavoidable hub) and Santiago (also unavoidable as a place to change planes in order to get between northern and southern Chile), they have yet to return to -- much less linger in -- any of the places any of them visited in previous seasons of the race. And they aren't travelling any more slowly, or taking any more time to experience the places they pass through. If anything, the producers have given them tasks and challenges that involve less interaction with local people than in some earlier seasons.

This is, I know, a race. So perhaps it's unfair or inappropriate to criticize it for moving too fast. But if they are going to call it "reality" television, I'm going to feel entitled to point out its departures from reality, and the lessons not to learn from it for your own travel planning.

Europe reconsidering rules for reservation systems

The European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union) has opened a two-month public consultation on possible revision or repeal of the EU Code of Conduct for Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS's).

The outcome of this obscure and technical-seeming regulatory proceeding could have important effects worldwide -- not just or even primarily within the EU -- on oligopoly control of travel information, consumer protection, and the privacy of travel data.

More details, why you should care, and what you can do below:

What are CRS's, and what do they do?

CRS's (also known as "Global Distribution Systems" or GDS's) are used by airlines, railroads, and other travel services providers and travel agencies. CRS's are the central players in the global infrastructure of travel reservation data. CRS's store Passenger Name Records (PNR's) and profiles as providers of outsourced database hosting services for airlines, travel agencies, and travel Web sites and mediate most communications between travel companies and between travellers and airlines , even when travellers make reservations and buy tickets "directly" from the airline.

For airlines or travel agencies that want comprehensive connectivity to other travel companies, there are only four major CRS's to choose between: Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo/Apollo, and Worldspan. All four were originally developed by individual airlines or airline consortia for their internal use, and only later offered to other airlines and travel agencies.

Why were CRS's regulated? What did the regulations require?

Both the oligopoly by the big four CRS's and their ownership by certain airlines led to well-founded fears by other airlines that the airlines that CRS-owning airlines might bias their displays and their responses to travel agencies queries to favor their owners' flights over those of competing airlines.

Regulation of CRS's by governments in the USA, Canada, and the EU developed as an expression of anti-monopoly (anti-trust) or competition law, to protect other airlines against unfair use by CRS's owners of their oligopoly power. Protection of travel agencies was only a secondary goal, and protection of consumers -- who have the least lobbying power -- was in practice distinctly tertiary in the development of CRS regulations.

The common feature of the CRS regulations in the USA, Canada, and the EU was a requirement that travel agencies that subscribed to any of the CRS's would be guaranteed equal access to information about the flights and fares of that CRS's owner(s) and other, competing airlines. There are strong parallels between this requirement for CRS neutrality and proposed "net neutrality" requirements for Internet access providers to provide their subscribers with equal access to their own or their partners' "content" (data) and content from their competitors. The idea is to require them -- as both a natural and de facto oligopoly -- to function as a provider of connectivity services rather than a provider of a controlled feed of selected information only.

The USA rules only protected airlines and travel agencies, but the Canadian and EU CRS regulations also protected individual travellers against abuse of oligopoly power by CRS's.

Travellers and consumers have never had access to the information or the query tools that CRS's provide to travel agents. Web gateways to CRS-derived data provide only a small subset of the query options and response details available from the line- command interfaces and displays used by travel agents. Under the CRS rules in the USA, travel agents were always free to choose which information to pass on to their customers (subject only to their rarely-enforced obligations to their customers, under the law of agency, if they charged them service fees). But the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's requires that travel agents as well as CRS's themselves serve as neutral information connectivity sources, provide travellers with nondiscriminatory information about different airlines' flights and schedules, and allow consumers, on request, to see and print the same displays that the agent uses.

As I've often pointed out, there are no legal protections for the privacy of travel data in the USA. CRS regulations in both Canada and the EU, however, recognized the sensitivity of travel data and the special role of the CRS's as aggregators of travel data (analogous to that of credit bureaus for financial data) by imposing additional protections for the privacy of reservation data, beyond the general requirements of Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the EU Data Protection Directive.

Article 9a of the EU Code of Conduct also requires CRS "subscribers" (travel agencies and agents) to "inform the consumer of the name and address of the system vendor [CRS], the purposes of the processing, the duration of the retention of individual data and the means available to the data subject of exercising his access rights." That would be an important prerequisite for travellers' exercise of their rights, if it were complied with: One reason CRS's data retention and access practices haven't been the subject of closer scrutiny is that most travellers are only dimly, if at all, aware of their existence, and have no way to know in which CRS their reservations are stored.

Unfortunately, the privacy clauses of the EU regulations have been ignored by CRS's, the travel industry, and the European Commission (which is charged with enforcement of the CRS code). As an exercise, I invite readers to try to find the required disclosures of which CRS are used, their data retention practices (not those of the travel agency), and their mechanisms for access to CRS data by travellers, for Expedia.co.uk, Opodo.co.uk (the airline-owned European online travel agency analogous to Orbitz.com), or eBookers.com. Or any other major EU travel agency. Violation of the privacy clauses of the EU regulations is near-universal and completely ignored by the EC.

Why and how are CRS regulations changing?

The original impetus for regulation of CRS's was their ownership by a small number of airlines, and the oligopoly power to control access to fare, schedule, and seat availability information wielded by the owners of the few major CRS's.

CRS ownership structures have changed. In the last five years, three of the big four CRS's have ceased to have any direct airline ownership, while airlines control only a minority of the fourth (Amadeus). The new owners of CRS's -- holders of stock in public companies, and private equity investors -- think that they could make more money if they were allowed to prioritize which fares and flights to list first, or to list at all, according to which were willing to pay the most for display presence and positioning. (Just as ISP's think they could make more money if they could control which data their subscribers can access, and charge extra for packet prioritization.)

CRS's new owners have used the decline in control of CRS's by airline owners as a rationale for CRS deregulation -- ignoring the continuing global oligopoly over fare and flight data by just four CRS's.

In the USA, they were successful (in the absence of any significant consumer awareness or opposition) in getting the former CRS regulations entirely rescinded in 2004.

Also in 2004, the Canadian CRS regulations were revised to eliminate many of their previous provisions and consumer protections, although some of the neutrality rules were retained. Perhaps most significantly, the former privacy clause of the Canadian CRS Regulations was entirely removed, ostensibly on the theory that it had been rendered unnecessary by the entry into force of Canada's general-purpose data protection law, PIPEDA. In fact, because it had no exceptions whatsoever, even for government and law enforcement, the consent requirement of the Canadian CRS regulations -- essentially identical to the one which remains in the EU CRS regulations -- gave air travellers substantially greater privacy protection, especially against governments, than PIPEDA or the EU Data Protection Directive.

Since 2004 many of the same CRS owners, backed by the government of the USA with its slavish devotion (when it suits its political agenda) to deregulation and "free" (even if oligopolistic) markets, have been pressuring the EU to follow the USA and Canada in eliminating or reducing the scope of its Code of Conduct for CRS's. The public consultation going on from now through 27 April 2007 is the next step in this process.

Do the European regulations matter only in Europe?

No. The EU Code of Conduct for CRS's applies to "any computerised reservation system ... offered for use or used in the territory of the [European] Community, irrespective of: the status or nationality of the system vendor, the source of the information used or the location of the relevant central data processing unit, [or] the geographical location of the airports between which air carriage takes place."

The USA CRS regulations have been repealed entirely, and never included any privacy protections. The privacy provisions of the Canadian regulations have been repealed. And the privacy clause of the EU CRS regulations provides significantly greater protection for travellers than the general EU Data Protection Directive. As a result, the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's sets the global standard for privacy protection of PNR data, and is the single most important privacy regulation in the world for travel data.

Because it is impossible to determine from a PNR in which jurisdiction(s) the data in that PNR were collected, CRS's that actually wanted to comply with the privacy provisions of the EU regulations would have to apply them to all PNR's they handle worldwide.

Similarly, because the USA and Canadian CRS regulations never included any requirement for neutrality in the information provided to consumers (only for what data CRS's provide travel agencies), the consumer neutrality requirement in the EU Code of Conduct is the only rule anywhere in the world guaranteeing any consumers access to airline flight information free of deliberate bias.

What will happen next?

It appears from the European Commission's consultation paper that in considering revision or repeal of the Code of Conduct for CRS's the Commission is thinking mainly about airline ownership of CRS's, and perhaps a little bit about oligopoly power. Impacts on consumers (rather than airlines and travel agents) are given short shrift, and the privacy and clauses of the current regulations (or the potential impact of repealing them, as was done in Canada) aren't considered at all. Most of the lobbying of the Commission also focuses on power struggles between industry players, rather than the interests of consumers or the travelling public.

As exemplified by its recent negotiations with the USA Department of Homeland Security on transfers of PNR data to the USA government, the European Commission has tended to ignore other European Union bodies with an interest in the travel data and information technology.

Before the Code of Conduct for CRS's was last revised in 1999, the Article 29 Working Party of national data protection directors (acting on the recommendation of its Subgroup on CRS's) issued formal recommendations to the European Commission for substantial strengthening of the privacy provisions of the Code of Conduct. In addition, a 1998 Working Document on Transfers of Personal Data to Third Countries produced by the Article 29 Working Party used the standard operating procedures of CRS's and airlines, which remain in practice today, as its example of the sort of cross-border data transfers that are supposed to be prohibited by the EU Data Protection Directive.

Those recommendations have never been acted on. So far as I can tell, no enforcement action has ever been taken against a CRS, airline, or travel agency for transferring PNR and other personal data outside the EU to countries that don't provide adequate protection for commercial travel data -- even when, as is done routinely, they transfer their entire reservation and customer database to a CRS that hosts the data in the USA where it enjoys no legal protection at all. And there is no evidence that the EC is considering the recommendations of the Article 29 Working Party or has invited that body to participate in the Commission's current review of the Code.

Similarly, the last time the Code was revised the European Parliament noted an interest in greater clarity and "strengthening protection of the traveller, especially in terms of the clarity of displays to which there is direct access, e.g. via the Internet." But it's hard to tell if these issues, or the European Parliament, will be part of the Commission's current work.

Consumer protection, information neutrality, and privacy are at stake, but will probably continue to be ignored unless travellers, consumers, and privacy advocates make themselves heard.

What should be done?

The Code of Conduct for CRS's should be (1) retained, (2) strengthened, and (3) enforced.

Why? The big four CRS's still have anti-competitive oligopoly power, and continue to engage in systematic violations of the existing Code of Conduct for CRS's as well as the Data Protection Directive, particularly with regard to transfers of data to commercial entities in the USA. (An issue distinct from the PNR transfers to USA government entities, which are much smaller in scale and impact but have gotten more attention.) Falling costs of data retention and rising government interest in travel reservation data make the privacy provisions of the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's increasingly important. The elimination of CRS regulations in the USA, and their reduction in Canada, makes it more important than ever that the EU retain its constraints on the demonstrated propensity of global CRS companies to engage anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and privacy invasive actions.

The Article 29 Working Party of national data protection directors, the LIBE (civil liberties) Committee of the European Parliament, and consumer advocates and consumer and travel privacy experts -- not just advocates for industry sectors -- should be invited to participate in the Commission's review of the current Code of Conduct for CRS's.

With respect to privacy, Article 6 of the Code of Conduct should be strengthened by amending the requirement that "A system vendor shall not make personal information concerning a
passenger available to others not involved in the transaction without the consent of the passenger" to refer to "the data subject" instead of "the passenger", in light of the fact that PNR's contain significant personal information about individuals other than passengers (including people paying for tickets for others, and travel industry personnel).

With respect to consumer protection, the display-neutrality rules in the Code of Conduct should be strengthened to require that "code-share" flights should be ranked in CRS's displays according to the airline that actual operate those flights. In particular, connections between flights actually operated by different airlines should be displayed as though they were interline connections between different airlines (which they actually are) rather than as online connections. This would cut down on the use of code-sharing to "game" CRS displays, which is a major component of the fraud of code-sharing .

And the European Commission needs to begin enforcing the Code of Conduct against the CRS's (and in most cases travel agencies, especially the largest online travel agencies that increasingly dominate the market) that systematically, routinely, and flagrantly ignore its privacy provisions as well as those of the EU Data Protection Directive.

Any "stakeholder", including individual travellers, can submit comments to the commission through Friday, 27 April 2007 (Brussels time) by e-mail to TREN-CONSULTATION-CRS@ec.europa.eu . You don't have to be a citizen or resident of the EU to submit comments or have them considered, and you can request that your comments be kept confidential and not be published on the EC Web site.

[Update, 26 April 2007: Comments filed by the Identity Project on the privacy, civil liberties, and human rights implications of revising or repealing the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's.]