The appointment of a senior IATA official to a seat on ARC's Travel Executive Council is another sign of the continuing cooperation between two entities that agencies and airlines worldwide use to process agencies' airline ticket sales.
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The official, Aleks Popovich, is IATA's senior vice president of industry and financial services. The ARC executive council is made up of travel agency executives and was established this year to help ARC build its relationship with travel agencies.
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ARC processes ticket sales in the U.S.; IATA performs the same function outside the U.S. with 88 Billing and Settlement Plans (BSP). The IATA BSP simplifies reporting and settling sales for both airlines and agencies. It gives IATA agencies one place for issuing sales reports and paying; airlines get a single payment from all IATA-accredited sales agencies that have sold their tickets.
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Dealing with multiple BSPs can be a problem for large agencies, particularly travel management companies with overseas accounts. It means that they're dealing with two different sets of standards for delivering similar kinds of information.
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"We have heard from airlines and agencies alike about the disparities of business processes between the ARC world and the BSP world," said Mike Premo, ARC president and CEO. "We are in the very early stages of talking about what we might be able to do together."
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Premo said that it's time to make processes easier for ARC and IATA's two major constituencies: airlines and agencies.
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Premo said that ARC and IATA might someday be able to do something like the universal application many colleges use today.
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"You fill out the application once," Premo said. "Those institutions can apply different criteria to evaluate that application but at least you only have to do it once. That may be a good model for ARC and IATA."
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He stressed that ARC and IATA are at the very beginning of investigating how closely the two entities could collaborate.
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ARC and IATA worked together on the launch of direct data service earlier this year, a tool for obtaining airline sales data directly from airlines.