International Air Ticket

Locating International Air Ticket Outlets

If the programs are discontinued or have to be replaced with some other independently produced program in an effort to assure that agents are qualified to sell international air ticket and to represent airlines as agents, the costs of operating in the business as agents, and the airlines' costs, are going to go up rather significantly. That's going to affect every agent -- good agent or not so good agent. So everyone's going to be affected by it, and ultimately, as the CAB said, those international air ticket are to be y consumers.

If all these legal developments eventually take place, wehink that's a very real possibility. Some of the things that have been talked about in the short term, such as agents selling only the services of a single carrier, if you look at the economics of that, it suggests to me that that would require a higher commission rather than a lower commission because the fully accredited agent today sells the services of 125 or 150 airlines throughout the world.

Fist of all, travel agents don't have a monopoly. There are in excess of 20,000, almost 21,000 agency locations in this country, and within the last year, for example, five new agents entered the business every day -- net -- after those who have departed or who might have failed for some reason. So there's no industry that knows competition the way agents do. They also compete in a sense with the airlines themselves, which are always available as an alternative way of buying a ticket if the consumer chooses to deal directly. And in addition there have been a number of innovations in recent years, such as contract bulk fares, which are not always sold through travel agents; there are charters; there are many disciplining factors at work in the marketplace. Travel agents know competition; they're pretty good at competition.

The problem is -- I don't have but a few minutes to explain this, but the accreditation system has been developed over a 40-year period. It permits a new entrant to the business to become a representative as an agent for 125 airlines around the world by dealing with one entity -- the Air Traffic Conference, in the case of domestic sales. That system has evolved over a long period of time. I don't believe that the industry has been doing it all wrong up to this time.