Loews Hotels Wins Dismissal of Antitrust Class Action With Prejudice

Paul, Weiss won a significant victory for Loews Hotels Holding Corporation when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed, with prejudice, a putative class action alleging an anticompetitive conspiracy among luxury hotel operators.

The plaintiff in Segal v. Amadeus IT Group, a hotel guest, alleged that several luxury hotel operators engaged in an unlawful agreement to exchange competitively sensitive information through Amadeus Hospitality, a hospitality software solutions company, that licensed Amadeus’ Demand360 platform to each defendant. According to the complaint, the hotels’ use of Demand360 allowed them to increase and stabilize the prices of “luxury hotel rooms” above competitive levels in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

U.S. District Judge Joan Gottschall dismissed the lawsuit last year but allowed the plaintiff to file an amended complaint to explain how the alleged use of Demand360 by the defendants could plausibly lead to higher prices.

In granting the defendants’ motion to dismiss a second time, this time with prejudice, the court agreed with our arguments that the complaint failed to plausibly allege how access to aggregated, anonymized information about hotel occupancy rates could have allowed the defendants to raise prices above competitive levels.

The Paul, Weiss team included litigation partners Katherine Forrest, Paul Brachman and Andrew Gordon.