Tag Archives: IATA

The Worldwide Airport Slot Board (WASB) comprising ACI World, IATA, and the Worldwide Airport Coordinators Group (WWACG) recommend regulators worldwide to temporarily adopt more flexible slot rules as quickly as possible in order to preserve essential air transport connectivity.

IATA is in the final development phase of the IATA Travel Pass, a digital health pass that will support the safe reopening of borders. The Pass will manage and verify the secure flow of necessary testing or vaccine information among governments, airlines, laboratories and travellers.

IATA has enhanced its Travel Industry Designator Service (TIDS) and will also no longer charge travel agencies to use the service. TIDS is an IATA programme which provides a unique identification code for travel agents and sales intermediaries who are not IATA-Accredited agents and are located outside of the USA.

IATA is working with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to put in place scalable, affordable and fast testing systems, revealed Conrad Clifford, Regional Vice-President Asia Pacific, IATA. Alexandre De Juniac, Director General & CEO, IATA had also said last week, “We have a solution to open borders while mitigating the risk of importing COVID-19 through air travel. That is universal testing. There is testing technology that aligns with our requirements for speed, accuracy, affordability, scalability and ease of use in the travel process. And we are seeing momentum towards implementation.”

Jyoti Mayal, President, TAAI, has said that they have been in discussion with Ministry of Civil Aviation for many of their issues, one of which is the acceptance of credit cards by airlines. “It has been cleared by the PAPJC and IATA, but we are still knocking every airline’s door. There should be a directive from the government for the same. There should be neutral capping of fares. Also, we are looking at remuneration in a big way. As travel consultants, we should have a right to charge our fee. Else, our services can be treated as MRP product so that we are protected. We should be allowed to charge 10% fee on it like the hotel industry is charging service fee,” she said.

Yossef Fatael, Vice President, UFTAA, has said that they have written to IATA that there is a need to renegotiate BSP agreement and structure. “We think that this is the time to renegotiate the agreement, the relationship, the structure of the BSP, as well as the way the relationship between the principal (airlines) and the agents is being governed. Our demand is to go back and discuss the governance of the programme and to make some urgent changes that will reflect all the weaknesses that we are experiencing during this crisis time,” he said while giving his presentation at UFTAA Mid-year Forum 2020 Part-2.

IATA has reported that intra-EU passengers have used many vouchers, issued since mid-March 2020 in lieu of refunds, to pay for travel between 15-Jun-2020 and 15-Jul-2020. Airlines are now incurring the deferred cost of transporting these passengers against limited or zero new revenues. IATA stated, “Whilst the issuance of vouchers helped decelerate cash burn a few weeks ago, their use will now accelerate cash burn in the coming months’. The data is based on IATA’s Billing and Settlement Process, which underestimates the use of vouchers because it does not record vouchers as exchanges in all cases.

International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced that airlines in the Asia-Pacific region will be the hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis, with losses expected to be $29 billion for 2020. This is more than a third of the $84.3 billion industry losses globally.

International Air Transport Association (IATA) has released a letter to national associations that states that agencies will receive only 8% of the total refunds from Jet Airways. The letter states, “Unfortunately, the balance of the Security Deposit held by IATA (after settling 100% of all refunds up to the date of suspension) was not sufficient to cover all the remaining refunds that have been approved by Jet Airways in the post-suspension refund process. Therefore, IATA will have to pro-rate the total refund against the net remaining balance withheld, which means that your agency will receive approximately 8% of the total refunds approved by the airline.” This will be automatically included in their billing. Refunds that have been rejected by the airline will not be processed.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has released criteria for the use of COVID-19 testing in the travel process. Should governments choose to introduce COVID-19 testing for travellers arriving from countries considered as high risk, testing must deliver results fast, be able to be conducted at scale, and operate to very high rates of accuracy. Additionally, testing must be cost-effective and not create an economic or logistical barrier to travel.