Travel agents to cash in on service fee after July 1
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Travel agents, faced with the July 1 suspension of the commission from SriLankan Airlines ticket sales, are likely to opt for cashing in on a yet-to-be levied service fee to sustain the business.While the July 1 move would encourage travel agents to move into the online booking systems, there would be provision to make gains from ticket sales through service fees levied.
In this respect, SriLankan Airlines is expected to come back to the travel agents on how they could still assist the industry once the ticket commissions are removed.
The national carrier had earlier announced that they would be removing the five per cent commission given to travel agents for the sale of their tickets by April 1. However, this date was later changed to July 1 to ease out their operations in time.
The carrier made this announcement following a meeting with the Travel Agents Association of Sri Lanka (TAASL) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) recently at the SriLankan Airlines office.
The travel industry called for an emergency meeting on March 17 to discuss about the circular issued by the airline to end the commission given to agents for ticket bookings that was previously scheduled to come into effect from April 1.
Since the carrier is levying a service fee for the sale of their tickets this same fee or even lesser could be adopted by the local travel agents.
“We are not affected since we are still holding and increasing our share in terms of sales,” former IATA-Sri Lanka President S. Paramanathan told the Business Times on Wednesday.
International Air Transport Association (IATA) billing system of payment or BSP is the centralised point for authorised agents of IATA. This system indicates a 35 per cent increase in 2016 compared to the previous year of ticket sales through the IATA BSP.
This indicates that the Sri Lankan travel agents were not losing their market share to any other sales port, Mr. Paramanathan pointed out.
Moreover, others in the industry point out that “people who have good service levels can survive,” adding that brokers would go out of business.