Sidley recently helped obtain a litigation victory for Accor Management U.S. Inc. (Accor) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Judge Joan B. Gottschall granted Accor and the other hotel defendants’ motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim.
The plaintiff alleged that the defendants had engaged in a nationwide hub-and-spoke conspiracy to restrain trade by raising the price of rooms in luxury hotels in metropolitan markets across the country through the use of Amadeus’s Demand360 platform. Specifically, the plaintiff claimed that the defendants’ exchanging of non-public and competitively sensitive present and forward-looking demand data, as a condition for use of the Demand360 platform, had eliminated price competition for luxury hotel rooms and enabled the hotel defendants to artificially raise their prices despite lower market demand, in violation of the Sherman Act.
Granting the hotel defendants’ motion to dismiss, the Court found that the complaint failed to state a plausible claim under the Sherman Act, and that while the plaintiff alleged a hub-and-spoke conspiracy involving the Demand360 platform, they did not provide sufficient evidence to support the existence of a horizontal agreement among the hotel defendants.
The Sidley team was led by Carrie Mahan (Washington, D.C.), and included Ben Mundel (Washington D.C.), Nicole Booth (Washington, D.C.), and Chloe Larsen (New York). Accor is a long-time client of the firm with Keith Del Prete (Century City) and Eileen Liu (Chicago) serving as relationship partners.
