Travel Weekly senior editor Michael Milligan spoke with ARC
president David Collins about ARC's declining numbers, daily
reporting and void rates.
Q: The number of ARC-accredited locations is
down [14% year-over-year]. Is ARC becoming obsolete?
A: Not in my mind. Just these past two weeks,
[transactions] are pretty much back to 2002 levels, which is a good
sign for this company and a good sign for the marketplace.
Q: What about agents who have relinquished
their ARC numbers to sell cruises, tours and other nonairline
products?
A: [Those agents] still are doing airline
ticketing, probably through another agency. So ARC tickets still
are being driven.
Q: ARC instituted procedures limiting the void
window on airline ticket sales. What's been the impact?
A: I think it is going as well as can be
expected. One key reason is the dialogue process [with travel
agents], which went on for about five months. We got a lot of input
and feedback and made changes.
Q: Is the next step daily reporting?
A: It is called daily reporting for shorthand,
but I don't think anybody knows exactly what it will look like.
What we will be addressing is the need that airlines have now --
and that is to get cleaner, faster data. They can't operate anymore
in the environment that existed in the paper age, when airlines had
to wait 14 days or more to get the data into their system. If we
are not responsive to that airline need, the airlines will go down
different paths, and the travel agents will be the losers.
Q:Daily reporting and daily remittance: Does
one lead to the other, or are they the same thing?
A:Moving to daily remittance is not part of
this project.
Q: ARC says there is a 6.75% void rate for
agents. That doesn't sound like a lot.
A: We do 175 million transactions a year. Take
6.75% of that [11.8 million]. That is an awful lot of tickets
voided considering what voiding is intended for. The airlines
compare this with their own systems, where the error rate is 1% or
2%. At the high end of our system, with the larger agencies and the
online agents, the error rate is 2% to 3%.
Q:Agents and airlines are often at odds. Where
does ARC fit in?
A:We sit in the middle between two customer
groups, and there is not a lot of love lost between those groups.
There may be things travel agents don't like and things they would
like to see changed, but at the end of the day agents think ARC
delivers a reliable service. And I think the airlines feel the same
way.