American Airlines Is Undermining Travel Agents, ASTA Says

04.12.2023 - 15:37 / skift.com / Selene Brophy / Airlines

The American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA) and American Airlines are going head-to-head in a complaint before the U.S. Department of Transport (DOT). Skift reached out to ASTA for the group’s latest position following a response from American Airlines last month.

The debate hinges on whether the airline has been wrong to withhold a big chunk of ticket options from travel agencies that fail to adopt its preferred booking technology.

Here’s a quick recap on the latest twist in a decade-long saga about how agencies process tickets.

Skift asked ASTA to reply to how American Airlines defended itself to regulators last month. ASTA did on Monday, exclusively, below. The response has been edited for brevity.

In late July and at ASTA’s request, a respected third-party fare data aggregator compared Edifact and NDC-channel fares for 142 different domestic city pairs flown by American.  

For each route, the aggregator also compared fares across different cabin classes (main cabin, main cabin extra, business, and first-class), where fares in both channels were published. Across the board, and without exception, the average NDC channel fare was lower, in some cases, by more than 50%.

In their DOT filing, AA intimates that NDC already includes robust functionality. This readiness is overstated.  

While the items listed in AA’s response regarding functionality are accurate, its [workflow] is also very limited in terms of functionality and only available as individual components and for new NDC reservations only.

What’s lacking from AA’s response is how atrocious the workflow is for new reservations.

We disagree with AA’s assertion that agencies are grasping onto the old ways of managing travel. Most travel agencies and TMCs lack the deep pockets of an airline or a major online travel agency to invest in proprietary solutions. We rely on third-party companies to enable our business.

The premise of the question — that the interests of consumers are in opposition to the interests of travel agencies and TMCs with respect to NDC — is simply false.

Nor is it accurate to characterize agencies as reluctant to adapt to new technologies.

Rather, it is about the ability of agencies and TMCs to provide the level of service the clients have come to expect without forcing them to choose between obtaining the lowest fare or forsaking … the duty of care obligations businesses owe to their employees when they travel on behalf of their employer.

American is using this claim to avoid taking responsibility for the very real duty of care problems [Outlined in page 34 of the complaint PDF] these changes are causing.  

Framing the issue this way misses the point, as it’s not a question of the superiority of one technology over