Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri signed a bill on Friday repealing the state’s 32-year-old travel agency licensing and bonding law.
It had been the nation’s first state law to require either agency licensing or bonding.
The law was repealed to save money at the state level and because there are now so few agents to regulate in the nation's smallest state.
The bond amount always remained at $10,000 but the measure was amended over the years in attempts to tighten standards and to make it easier to weed out the incompetent, or worse. A 1981 amendment added individual licenses and testing for managers and travel sellers.
Earlier amendments, approved in 1979, included an attempt to deal with out-of-state agencies marketing their services to Rhode Island residents. One amendment required that nonresident travel companies soliciting in Rhode Island retain the state's director of business regulation as their attorney. The goal was to enable consumers to sue out-of-staters more easily.
The state did not attempt to license and bond out-of-state travel sellers.