Mark Pestronk
Q: Every year, travel suppliers send us contracts covering rates, commissions and special concessions for the calendar year. These contracts have two things in common: First, they invariably arrive well after the start of the year -- sometimes months late. This practice puts pressure on us to sign quickly before the supplier decides that it's too late to have an agreement covering the entire current year, retroactively to Jan. 1. Second, we usually have to sign by an app that offers a digital signing service, such as Docusign, where our only practical choices are to accept or decline. This practice discourages negotiation of the contract. Do you think that the suppliers use these pressure tactics intentionally?
A: I don't represent travel suppliers, so I can't tell you what their intentions are. However, I have no doubt that those two practices, taken together, have the effect of pressuring agencies to agree to whatever the suppliers want them to agree to.
Take the delays, for example. Let's say you receive a commission agreement for 2026 from an important supplier at the end of February because, as you noted, it nearly always comes late. The agreement is lengthy and full of many similar-sounding criteria for performance. Most agency owners probably do not have the time or patience to read and understand every clause in the agreement.
Even if the agency owner takes the time and wishes to get clarifications or suggest changes, it will probably be weeks until the supplier provides answers and, in any event, the answer will probably be that no changes are allowed.
By now it is late March, and the agency owner is a little worried about whether the supplier will even accept an agreement signed at this late a date. The temptation is great simply to go ahead and sign the agreement and get on with business.
To add more pressure on the agency owner, the supplier has sent the agreement digitally. It is probably a rare business owner who knows how to add comments or make changes to a Docusign document and send it back to the supplier. In fact, unless the sending party has chosen the option to allow edits, the recipient can't change the agreement at all in the Docusign software.
The only way to suggest specific changes is to do what lawyers should do: download the document into a PDF and add margin comments, or use a subscription-based application such as Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert it to Word. Then, you redline the suggested changes (or have your attorney do so) or add margin comments and send them back to the supplier with a cover email requesting the changes and explaining why you need them.
Do you go through that process, or do you succumb to the double pressure and just sign what is sent to you? In my experience, it is a rare agency owner who will take the time, and even mega-agencies mostly just sign supplier agreements without any changes.
My advice: don't be pressured. Take the time to request needed changes to supplier agreements that are important to your agency.