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Loews Hotels Wins Dismissal of Antitrust Class Action
- Client News
- March 31, 2025
Practices
Paul, Weiss won a significant victory on behalf of Loews Hotels Holding Corporation, when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed a putative class action alleging an anticompetitive conspiracy among luxury hotel operators.
The complaint claims that several luxury hotel operators engaged in a hub-and-spoke conspiracy with one another and Amadeus Hospitality, a hospitality software solutions company, through Amadeus’ Demand360 software platform. The complaint claims the hotel operators used the platform to exchange “proprietary, non-public, present and forward-looking demand data,” allowing them “to charge increased rates for Luxury Hotel Rooms despite historically low overall demand, divorced from the market forces that drive supply and demand in a competitive environment,” in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.
In dismissing the case, federal district Judge Joan B. Gottschall agreed with our arguments that the complaint fails to allege a hub-and-spoke conspiracy, finding that the complaint failed to allege an agreement among the “spokes” (the hotel operators) around the “hub” (the Demand360 platform). The judge also found that the complaint failed to plausibly allege how the sharing of occupancy information had an anticompetitive effect.
The Paul, Weiss team includes litigation partners Katherine Forrest, Paul Brachman and Andrew Gordon.