22 Febraury 2022: ERA recently participated in the Florence School of Regulation (FSR) Intermodal Forum on 'Aviation and Multimodal Digital Mobility Services in the EU'. The forum brought together various stakeholders - including EU policymakers (DG MOVE and EUROCONTROL), airlines, travel intermediaries, metasearch companies, consumer organisations and academics - for a discussion on the challenges and enablers of delivering  EU-wide multimodal ticketing in the context of aviation. More specifically, forum participants tackled FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) criteria, access to data, dominant position and the upcoming MDMS proposal.

DG MOVE presented some of the options on the table for their proposal on MDMS, expected in June 2023.

They stressed the objectives of the initiative:

• Compare and purchase transport tickets and mobility products.
• Multimodal Digital Platforms
• Level playing field between all players: rail, maritime, air, B2B and B2C and key principles (in particular neutral display).
• Proportionate market intervention where market failures.

The structure of the future MDMS (as it stands today) in based on four building blocks:

1. Voluntary FRAND framework
2. Mandatory FRAND, where there is a risk of market failure (MDMS or air operator indispensable) or as a corrective tool
   1. B2B MDMS will include an obligation to integrate willing (air) operators only if MDMS has > 50 per cent share of all (air) tickets sold in the EU
   2. B2C MDMS will include mandatory FRAND and obligation to integrate willing (air) operators only of MDMS has a > 50 per cent share of all (air) tickets sold in the EU
   3. For air operators, mandatory FRAND - including access to full content - will apply only if the air operator (group-level) has a >50 per cent share of all air seat-km in the EU as well as aviation closed PSOs.
3. Mandatory consumer protection provisions, i.e. neutral display and ban on self-preferencing
4. Mandatory technical framework to facilitate co-operation

As for the next steps, DG MOVE (Unit B4) will organise another workshop on 28 February 2023 in which ERA will take part.

The Impact Assessment of the regulatory proposal will be finalised by the end of May and the proposal should be adopted end June 2023.