Domestic Airline Mergers and Defining the Relevant Market: From Cities to Airports
![handle is hein.journals/jalc83 and id is 869 raw text is:
DOMESTIC AIRLINE MERGERS AND DEFINING THE
RELEVANT MARKET: FROM CITIES TO AIRPORTS
ALEXA NAUMOVICH*
I. INTRODUCTION
In 2017, more than four billion people in the world used avia-
tion to travel.' Airlines within the United States transported 741
million passengers domestically.2 As passenger demand for air
travel has risen astronomically, the number of airlines who serve
domestic passengers has dwindled to five major U.S. airlines.'
This shift in the airline industry and the reduced number of
domestic airlines requires the Department ofJustice (DOJ) Anti-
trust Division (Antitrust Division) to alter its analysis of airline
mergers to determine their anticompetitive ramifications.
This article serves as guidance for the future of airline merg-
ers within the United States. It argues city-pairs should not pro-
vide the only method of defining the relevant market and that
airports should be included in the relevant market determina-
tion. To accomplish this, Part II will provide the background of
antitrust law and the airline industry by describing the historical
development of the governing legal rules and the Antitrust Divi-
sion's oversight of merger law. Part III will discuss the develop-
ment of defining the relevant market in airline mergers by
* J.D. cum laude from SMU Dedman School of Law, 2018; B.A. in
International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies from University of Arkansas,
2011. The author would like to thank those who gave their assistance with this
article and would also like to thank her family for their support.
1 2017 Marked by Strong Passenger Demand, Record Load Factor, INT'L AIR TRANsP.
ASS'N (Feb. 1, 2018), http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-02-01-
01.aspx [https://perma.cc/PM58-6YF6].
2 BuREAu OF TRANsp. STATISTICS, DEP'T OF TRANSP., BTS 12-18, 2017 Annual
and December U.S. Airline Traffic Data, https://www.bts.dot.gov/newsroom/2017-
annual-and-december-us-airline-traffic-data [https://perma.cc/9BBD-TQ4Z]
(last updated Mar. 15, 2018).
3 Simon Kurash, Note, Airline Consolidation: A Study of the American-US Airways
Merger, Other Major Mergers from the Past Two Decades, and Their Effect on Consumers,
48 SUFFOLK U. L. REv. 897, 898 (2015).
839](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jalc83&div=36&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Domestic Airline Mergers and Defining the Relevant Market: From Cities to Airports
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