ORLANDO — Travel advisors, have you experienced slow — or no — commission payment from a hotel? Soon, you'll be able to tell ASTA about it, potentially landing that hotel on a published blacklist.
Zane Kerby, ASTA's CEO, spoke about the issue of slow or no commission payments on Monday during CoNexion 2025, Nexion's annual conference held this year at the Loews Sapphire Falls Resort here.
"The great and famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward said something to ASTA members recently that stuck with me — it was very profound," Kerby said. "He said, 'If you walt by a problem a few times and you don't do anything about it, it's not a problem anymore. It's just part of the landscape.'
"We've been walking by a problem here in our industry for a really long time, and honestly, I'm getting tired of it."
That problem is slow- or no-pay suppliers, Kerby said. In a poll conducted several months ago, ASTA asked its members about it, and they reported a clear offender: Onyx CenterSource, which acts as a conduit between hotels and agencies that chases commissions. But ASTA asked Onyx to come to Salt Lake City during its Travel Advisor Conference in May, which they did, and company representatives told Kerby they don't hold payments for more than a few hours.
They blamed local hoteliers, Kerby said, and he asked for a list of offenders.
"They kind of laughed me off, but I wasn't laughing, so we're going to build our own," he said.
By the end of the month, ASTA members will have the ability to report slow- or no-pay hoteliers to the Society online. Members will also be able to search for hotels reported as such, and they will appear on what he called a "blacklist" of offenders.
ASTA will also get its lawyers involved, Kerby said.
"This is an important thing. We want you to be paid promptly, and we want you to be paid fairly," Kerby said to applause. "And so I want you to know that ASTA is taking this very, very seriously."
"Onyx shares ASTA's goal of improving payment speed and collected commissions for travel advisors and agencies," said chief commercial officer Tony Wagner. "The exchange in Salt Lake City was about a request from ASTA to share detailed customer data with a third party — something we could not agree to because it would violate hotel and agency confidentiality and data protection agreements. Any reference to 'laughing' was related to the data-sharing request to an unrelated third party (ASTA), not to the issue of commission payments or to dismissing ASTA's concerns."
UPDATE: This story has been updated to add comment from Onyx CenterSource.