Sabre is under fire after a resident in California decided to file a class action lawsuit against the company over a “credit card data breach in Sabre’s SynXis hotel reservations system.” In the lawsuit, the allegations against Sabre are many, and include “breach of implied contract, negligence, several violations of California’s unfair competition law, unfair and deceptive business practices, constitutional invasion of privacy, breach of the covenant of duty of good faith and fair dealing, and violation of state data breach laws.”
Sabre is under fire after a resident in California decided to file a class action lawsuit over a “credit card data breach in Sabre’s SynXis hotel reservations system.” In the lawsuit, the allegations against Sabre are many, and include “breach of implied contract, negligence, several violations of California’s unfair competition law, unfair and deceptive business practices, constitutional invasion of privacy, breach of the covenant of duty of good faith and fair dealing, and violation of state data breach laws.”
The lawsuit itself was filed on July 12 “by the Wilshire Law Firm on behalf of Sandra Smith of Los Angeles in U.S. District Court in California” after Smith and other members of the suit “booked reservations during the period of the breach with hotels that use SynXis in the United States.” It turns out that, according to Sabre officials, “an unauthorized party gained access to credit card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names from August 2016 to March 2017.” The company later “disclosed the breach of SynXis, a res system used by about 36,000 hotels,” including “Club Quarters Hotels, Four Seasons, Hard Rock, Loews and Trump Hotels.”
Sabre investigated the breach, and announced earlier this month that the breach was “contained to a limited subset of hotel reservations.” However, that did little to quell the concerns of members of the public, like Smith and the other plaintiffs. According to the lawsuit, Smith and the other plaintiffs “face years of reviewing personal and financial records,” and Smith even claims there have already “been several fraudulent charges on her credit and debit cards since the breach.” The lawsuit also states:
“As a result of Sabre’s wrongful actions and inactions, customer information was stolen. Many of the customers who booked hotel rooms have had their PII [personally identifiable information] compromised, have had their privacy rights violated, have been exposed to the risk of fraud and identity theft, and have otherwise suffered damages.”
On the other side of the aisle, Sabre is pushing back against the allegations and has stated that it will “vigorously defend against [the lawsuit’s] many inaccuracies and factual and legal errors.”
So what do Smith and the other plaintiffs hope to gain from the lawsuit? Well, at the moment the suit is seeking an “award of actual and compensatory damages in an amount to be determined.” Given the fact that data breaches have been in the news quite frequently over recent years, it will be interesting to see how this case plays out.
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