King and Travel Group Lawsuits: Antitrust, Fraud, and Wages

The phrase “King group travel lawsuits” pulls together four unrelated legal matters that share little beyond the travel industry and a name in common. They are the King v. Trek Travel overtime wage case, the TravelPass Group antitrust litigation against major hotel chains and Expedia, the recent class action against Team Travel Source over youth-sports “stay-to-play” policies, and the criminal and insolvency proceedings that ended India’s Cox & Kings Group. Each has different parties, different claims, and different outcomes, and they are worth taking one at a time.

King v. Trek Travel: An Overtime Wage Case, Settled

In 2018, Zeb King sued Trek Travel LLC, the guided cycling and adventure tour operator, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. The case, King v. Trek Travel, LLC, Case No. 3:18-cv-00345, alleged unpaid overtime wages.¹

Trek Travel employs its guides as hourly workers. During peak season, roughly April through October, full-time guides typically work 10 to 20 trips on a schedule of two or three weeks on followed by a week off, with additional warehouse and equipment duties in between. North American guides started at $12 per hour at the time, supplemented by customary gratuities of $40 to $50 per guest per day.²

The case reached the pretrial conference stage and then resolved. Court records show it was terminated on December 12, 2019, with a disposition of “settled.”³ The settlement terms are not public.

TravelPass Group’s Antitrust Fight With Hotel Chains and Expedia

TravelPass Group, a Utah-based online hotel booking company, ran one of the more aggressive antitrust campaigns in recent travel-industry litigation. Its theory: beginning in 2014, the largest hotel companies agreed among themselves to stop bidding on one another’s brand-name keywords in Google’s paid search auctions, and Expedia served as the go-between, monitoring compliance and pressuring affiliates like TravelPass to stop bidding on branded hotel terms by threatening their access to hotel room inventory.⁴

The federal complaint, TravelPass Group LLC v. Caesars Entertainment Corp. et al., Case No. 5:18-cv-00153, was filed in the Eastern District of Texas before Judge Robert W. Schroeder III. The defendants included Expedia Group, Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, Caesars Entertainment, Hyatt Hotels, Choice Hotels International, Red Roof Inns, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, and Six Continents Hotels (part of InterContinental Hotels Group).⁴

Serial Settlements and a Mid-Trial Exit

As trial approached, defendants settled one after another. Caesars resolved in December 2020, Choice Hotels in August 2021, and by October 2021 Marriott was the last defendant standing when the case went to a jury.⁵ Five days into testimony, Marriott also settled on confidential terms, and the case was dismissed with prejudice as to both TravelPass’s claims and Marriott’s counterclaims.⁶

In a public statement issued as part of the Marriott resolution, TravelPass acknowledged “that Marriott did not participate in any unlawful activity or engage in any conspiracy” and extended “a public apology to Marriott and the Marriott family for any harm to Marriott’s reputation.”⁷ A retraction of that kind during a mid-trial settlement is unusual.

The Expedia Track and the Utah Investigation

TravelPass’s disputes with Expedia moved on a separate track. TravelPass sued Expedia in Utah state court and in the District of Utah (Case No. 2:17-cv-00246), alleging that an Expedia employee leaked TravelPass’s trade secret data to a competitor called Res.com.⁸ The federal case was stayed in April 2017 pending mandatory arbitration in Seattle under the parties’ affiliation agreement. Expedia later obtained leave to intervene in the Texas hotel-chain case in April 2021 to protect confidential information tied to that arbitration.⁵

The Utah Attorney General’s office also opened an investigation under the Utah Antitrust Act based on TravelPass’s allegations. Lawyers for Attorney General Sean Reyes told a court they had “reasonable cause to believe that a violation of the Utah Antitrust Act has occurred,” and a judge ordered TravelPass to comply with the state’s civil investigative demands.⁴

Team Travel Source: The Stay-to-Play Class Action

A class action filed May 20, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky targets a different corner of the industry. In Russell et al. v. The Complete Plan, Inc. d/b/a Team Travel Source, Case No. 3:26-cv-00360-CHB, parents of youth athletes accuse Team Travel Source of using “stay-to-play” policies to force families to book hotels through its platform as a condition of tournament eligibility.⁹

The complaint alleges three specific practices:

Coerced bookings: parents were told teams would be ineligible to compete if reservations weren’t made through Team Travel Source’s system.
Mandatory “nightly housing fees” added to reservations with no clear benefit to the consumer.
Pricing deception: despite a “Lowest Rate Guarantee,” the platform allegedly charged more than direct hotel booking or other channels and refused to honor rate adjustments when customers produced evidence of lower prices.

The class is represented by Almeida Law Group, Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise, and Kaplan Johnson Abate & Bird. No rulings have been reported at this stage.⁹

The case sits inside a wider policy fight. State attorneys general in Texas and Michigan have opened antitrust investigations into Black Bear Sports Group and the NHL’s Dallas Stars over their youth hockey operations.¹⁰ At the federal level, the Let Kids Play Act, introduced May 13, 2026 by Senator Chris Murphy and Representative Chris Deluzio, would ban stay-to-play requirements outright and give the FTC, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and state attorneys general enforcement authority.¹¹

Cox & Kings Group: Alleged Fraud, Criminal Cases, and Liquidation

Cox & Kings, founded in 1758 and one of the oldest travel companies in the world, employed more than 3,000 people before defaulting on loan payments in 2019. Those defaults triggered corporate insolvency proceedings in India and a sprawling criminal investigation.

The Alleged Fraud

India’s Enforcement Directorate told a special court that the proceeds of crime in the case amount to nearly Rs 7,000 crore. Forensic audits referenced by investigators alleged that between 2015 and 2019, the firm moved funds through related-party transactions worth Rs 21,000 crore, falsified records, and booked Rs 9,000 crore in fictitious sales. The books allegedly contained 15 fictitious customers and 147 sets of non-existent clients. When the company sold its UK subsidiary, Holiday Break Education Limited, for Rs 4,387 crore, investigators allege the proceeds were largely siphoned off rather than used to repay lenders, with at least $15.34 million transferred to Kuber Investment Mauritius, a firm controlled by promoter Peter Kerkar.¹²

Arrests and Bail Denials

The Enforcement Directorate arrested former CFO Anil Khandelwal and internal auditor Naresh Jain in October 2020 on money laundering charges.¹³ On November 26, 2020, the ED arrested Kerkar under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.¹⁴ The probe also reached the lender side, with a Rs 3,642 crore loan from Yes Bank to Cox & Kings allegedly sanctioned by then-CMD Rana Kapoor in violation of normal lending procedures; Kapoor was placed in judicial custody on charges of accepting kickbacks.

Kerkar’s detention has been long. A special PMLA court denied bail in April 2021. By the time the Bombay High Court took up a subsequent petition, he had spent nearly three years in custody as an undertrial prisoner. In January 2024, Justice P.K. Chavan denied bail, ruling that the right to release is not absolute even after a defendant has served half the minimum prescribed imprisonment under the PMLA.¹⁵

From Insolvency to Liquidation

The NCLT Mumbai Bench admitted Cox & Kings into insolvency resolution in October 2019. No viable resolution plan emerged, and on December 16, 2021 the tribunal ordered the company into liquidation.¹⁶ Liquidator Ashutosh Agarwala was still working to dispose of remaining assets as of early 2025, using the process for “not readily realizable assets” under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code’s liquidation regulations.¹⁷ Related proceedings, including claims of fraudulent trading and undervalued transactions against former executives, remained active before the NCLT as recently as late 2025.¹⁸

Where TravelPass Fits in the Broader Hotel-Booking Antitrust Picture

TravelPass wasn’t the first attempt to challenge online hotel booking practices under the antitrust laws. A consolidated multidistrict litigation, In re: Online Travel Company (OTC) Hotel Booking Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 3:12-md-02405, brought consumer price-fixing claims against Expedia, Booking.com, Orbitz, Priceline, and hotel groups including Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and Wyndham. Judge Jane J. Boyle in the Northern District of Texas dismissed the consolidated action in February 2014, finding plaintiffs had failed to sufficiently allege an actual conspiracy.¹⁹ More recently, Swiss booking firm Amoma sued Expedia in the Western District of Washington, alleging Expedia used its Trivago subsidiary to drive Amoma out of business, and seeking $100 million under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In February 2024, Judge Barbara Rothstein denied Expedia’s motion to dismiss, allowing the case to proceed.²⁰

1
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2
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3
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4
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PR Newswire. Almeida Law Group Represents Parents Suing Team Travel Source Over Stay-to-Play Junk Fee
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Oklahoma Watch. Federal Bill Would Ban Stay-to-Play and Force Private Equity Out of Youth Sports
11
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14
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15
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16
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19
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