They must restrict themselves in the ways they offer joint bids to corporate clients.
They must limit the use of their codes on computer reservations systems.
Furthermore, at least a quarter of each airline's new code-share flights must be to airports that the airline did not directly serve, or to airports to which the carrier had fewer than three nonstop daily flights as of August 2002. And at least 35 percent of each airline's new code-share flights have to meet that requirement or be to small-hub or non-hub airports.
"We basically applaud DOT's unprecedented effort here to review such a complex proposal," said C.A. Howlett, senior vice president for public affairs at America West Airlines, which lobbied against the code-share alliance.
"We think their analysis clearly exhibited their concerns that supported ours that this proposal presented some very unique and unprecedented anticompetitive concepts and practices," Howlett said.
But one strong proponent of code-share alliances strongly criticized the agency for the conditions it wants to impose.
"I think these guys are having a great deal of difficulty in figuring out one, where the industry is going and two, what they're role is in it," said Michael Levine, a former airline executive and a professor at Yale Law School.
"They seem to me to be trying very hard to limit the rate of change in the industry," he said.
Levine, who as an executive at Northwest helped formulate the code-share partnerships there, said the Transportation Department was essentially trying to re-regulate the industry through its naive view of competition. Having a couple of large code-share alliances competing against each other does not present antitrust issues, he said.
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