Mark Pestronk
Q: Everyone associated with our agency -- advisors, back-office people, ICs and executives -- works from home. Our actual office is quite small, and there is hardly anyone there except to pick up mail and packages a few times a week. It would be nice just to close the office, stop paying rent and have mail and packages sent to my home. When we need to have a staff or client meeting, we could do it on Zoom or rent a hotel conference room, here or at a resort. Does ARC, Iatan or CLIA require us to have a physical office? Does any law require us to have one?
A: When I first started in law practice many years ago, the airline cartel (ARC's predecessor) required an office that was "open and accessible to the general public," with signage on the door and with at least two rooms of office space. One room was for the agents and the public, and a back room was for the safe in which you kept blank ticket stock. The rooms had to be separate from any other business's office.
You had to prove that the office met these requirements by including photos along with your application. You also had to be periodically inspected so that the airlines could be sure that you were continuing to meet these requirements. The same rules applied to the agency's headquarters and all branches.
With the advent of paperless ticketing, email, videoconferencing and cloud-based databases instead of servers for the GDS and back office, it became much less important to have an office or safe, so all these requirements were gradually repealed.
Today, ARC's sole rule concerning the premises of an appointed agency is as follows: "Agent's Location must have the licenses required by the jurisdiction in which it is located. Required licenses include, but are not limited to, any and all licenses mandated by federal, state or local authority, which enable Agent to lawfully conduct business at each of its Locations."
In other words, if local zoning laws allow you to operate a business from your home and you have the necessary state or local business license for your home, ARC will approve your "Location." If you are in one of the four states that has a seller of travel registration law, you also have to be duly registered under that law. I'm not sure why the word "federal" is included in ARC's rule, as there is no relevant federal law.
Iatan has similar, simple requirements, and CLIA's are even simpler: "Any travel seller or department of a travel seller that is actively engaged in the business of selling cruise travel can be a CLIA Travel Agency Member if they attest to the fact they are meeting all federal, state and local ordinances relative to conducting such sales."
So there is no need to be open to the public, no need for signage, no need for a safe and no need for premises separate from other businesses. You can stay home -- and your staff can, too.