At the end of 2020, Sabre and Southwest Airlines announced they had come to terms on a "full participation" agreement. Some might not be clear on how that differs from the notion of "full content," a pillar of airline-global distribution system agreements for going on 18 years that could be on the outs.
Before jurisdictions including the United States and the European Union more than a dozen years ago deregulated GDS companies, they required airlines with investments in those companies to participate completely in all of them as a consumer protection measure. With the rise of . . .