What Travel Advisors Stand To Gain, Lose From Final FAA Reauthorization Bill

President Joe Biden signed the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act into law on Thursday. The law provides funding for the Federal Aviation Administration for the next five years and addresses various aspects of air travel related to consumer protections, investments in air traffic control staffing and much more.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Federal Aviation Authority reauthorization bill on Wednesday and sent the bill to President Joe Biden's desk following last week's bipartisan passage in the Senate.

While summer might be beginning its swing in destinations across the globe, many travelers have just now started contemplating where they’d like to visit this summer. 

United Airlines expects the 2024 edition of the Memorial Day holiday travel period to be the busiest in the company’s history.

As people in the United States prepare for the Memorial Day holiday travel period, Airlines for America (A4A) expects that carriers will transport an estimated 271 million passengers around the world this summer.

Several major airlines in the United States have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Transportation (DOT) over the new fee transparency rules approved by President Joe Biden and his administration in April.

Hidden cameras have been a hot topic in the headlines.

It’s been yet another rocky year for the airlines amid a parade of troubling headlines ranging from problems with Boeing aircraft to concerns about cancellations and delays as we head into what could be a record-breaking summer for air travel. So, it may come as little surprise that fliers have mixed feelings about the airlines these days.

Indian airlines will account for half of the country’s international passenger traffic by the 2027-28 financial year, according to a report by credit rating agency CRISIL Ratings. That’s up from 43% this fiscal year, with India’s international passenger traffic at around 70 million.

Could the summer air travel season be impacted by a potential Congressional amendment?

Los Angeles, California — The United States has “serious problems” when it comes to international inbound travel that must be resolved if the country is to regain its competitive edge.That’s the assessment of the U.S. Travel Association and its leader Geoff Freeman, the organization’s president and CEO.Freeman delivered his sober take on the problems plaguing inbound travel to the United States during a press conference today in Los Angeles, California where a travel industry convention is taking place.“The United States remains the world’s most desired nation to visit, but at the end of 2019 we had 79 million visitors internationally and in 2023 we had 67 million international visitors," Freeman told the media gathered for the IPW 2024 convention. “That’s only 84 percent of pre-pandemic levels.”“When you look at travel as an export - before the pandemic we had a 12 billion [person] travel trade surplus. At end of last year we had about a 50 billion [person] travel trade deficit,” Freeman added.There's a handful of challenges that the United States currently faces when it comes to attracting international visitors and significantly ramping up inbound numbers, said Freeman. And some of those challenges are within the country’s ability to fix, while others are not.There’s not much that can be done, for instance, about the strength of the U.S. dollar, which makes this country very expensive to visit from many other parts of the world. Similarly, there’s not much U.S. officials can do about the current prohibitions surrounding flights over Russian airspace, which pose a major obstacle for airlines coming to this country from China.However, visa wait times continue to be a significant roadblock for international visitors — and that’s an issue U.S. officials can — and should — be able to fix, Freeman said.“On the visa side, I checked this morning — if you're a Columbian and want to come to the U.S. the wait times are over 600 days to get an interview at a U.S. consulate,” said Freeman. “If you’re in Mexico, the wait times are over 800 days.”By contrast, for visitors from India the wait timeline for visa interviews has recently been reduced to a somewhat more reasonable 150 to 200 days. Similarly, wait times for those visiting from Brazil have been reduced drastically — from what was once 500 days down to just 21 days, according to the U.S. Travel Association.“It shows us that it can be done. When the State Department uses their ingenuity and gets creative and puts resources in the right places, this problem can be solved,” explained Freeman. “But it’s been going on for far too long. It needs to be solved now.”

O’Hare International Airport in Chicago is one of the biggest and busiest airports in the country. But nobody ever referred to it as a possible money driver.