ar is never a welcome prospect, but
the financial markets seemed to react with relief last week when
President Bush told Saddam Hussein that he had 48 hours to get out
of town. As this was being written, the clock was ticking, the Dow
rising.
The travel markets are another matter. Our sigh of relief is
still to come. The immediate impact of the president's ultimatum
was to trigger another wave of rethinking by business and leisure
travelers and a parade of announcements from suppliers about
kinder, gentler cancellation and rebooking policies.
Regardless of one's personal political views, we hope all travel
professionals can take some comfort from this: The sooner this
apparently inevitable conflict begins, the sooner it will end --
and with it, we hope, the uncertainty that has kept consumers at
bay.
• • •
ARC has spoken
he ARC board of directors, a
stellar group of people who are employed by airlines, has uttered
the final word -- for now -- about the voiding of tickets: There
will be less of it.
Effective June 4, agents will have 24 hours after the day of the
transaction to void a ticket in the GDS, and another 24 hours after
that for voiding via IAR. That's it. Gone are the days when agents
had the power to make a transaction disappear a week after the
fact.
In response to agent concerns, ARC will help travel agents
explain to clients that there's no point in "shopping around" for
an agent with a better voiding window. The new rule will apply to
all ARC outlets.
Still unclear is whether travel agency clients will be able to
waltz up to an airport counter, flash some frequent flyer precious
metal and get a waiver that the agency was unable to obtain.
Some agents may be surprised to learn that the airline employees
on ARC's board are sensitive to this concern. ARC says it's not
possible to "ensure that there would never be a case where a
customer who has been denied a waiver through their travel agent
would not possibly receive one at the airport." But ARC's directors
say they want to ensure that such occurrences are "rare."
How we get from here to rare remains to be seen.
• • •
Chapters 11
S Airways, to its credit, is on
schedule to emerge from bankruptcy protection.
United, to our dismay, is not. The airline uttered the "L" word
for what appears to be the first time the other day, warning that
it may be forced into liquidation if it doesn't get the labor
concessions it claims to need. We hope it doesn't come to that.
Despite all its faults, we'd prefer a reorganized United to no
United.