President's Podium: ADM Issues
I had a passionate conversation with one of our members the other day about ADM's. The member contacted ACTA to discuss their issues with an airline who has been wrongly issuing their agency for commission violations because the airline's audit department does not have the up-to-date contracts. Being the resilient bunch Travel Agents are, our member also commented, "David, that’s not the biggest problem. We can handle that."
Here’s where the conversation got interesting. When the member agency called the airline rep to discuss the issue, she openly noted that their BSP audit has been out-sourced to a private, for-profit company. She implied that no matter how valid our dispute (through BSP) is, they will reject it because the outsourced company are paid based on successful fines. In other words, Travel Agencies have no choice but to (a) dispute, (b) wait for the predictable reply, and (c) pull the ADM from BSP to re-dispute directly with the airline.
Hearing this member's story, I am interested in learning more about your own personal experience(s). Have you found this issue of airlines outsourcing their audits to for-profit companies to be a growing trend? My instinct tells me this biases the process and encourages the airlines to issue unecessary volumes of ADM (admin fees) to pay these third party companies.
As you know, I am an active Board Member of the World Travel Agents Association Alliance (WTAAA). This issue did come to light at the WTAAA and IATA meetings in Singapore. We all had full knowledge of the guilty airlines and pushed IATA hard on it. In the end, IATA was protected by legislation that the air carriers can do as they like in this situation.
We are having a WTAAA meeting here in Toronto in March and I will ask this topic to be on the agenda (as ECTAA will be attending from Europe as well) to discuss what, if anything, can be done for the big picture.
Sincerely,
