No Need To Fear IATA's Proposal
<B>No Need To Fear IATA's Proposal</B>
Responding to many corporate travel offices that bemoaned their inability to more closely track their travel records in a standardized fashion, the International Air Transport Association's member airlines worked for five years to come up with a solution they thought everyone would leap at. What IATA wrought was the Corporate Client Identification Service, a voluntary program in which any airline or corporate could elect to participate.
With so much work invested in the proposal, IATA and its member airlines have been more than a little surprised at the criticism leveled at it by some North Americans, who have inaccurately said that CCIS is anticompetitive, mandatory and nonconsensual. These misconceptions are fueled by fear and misunderstanding.
The CCIS will not provide any more data than can be extracted today from traditional tracking methods. Instead, it will give travel buyers the freedom to track tickets issued by any agent worldwide and simplify corporate performance tracking for everyone involved--corporates, travel consultants, agents and airlines--by providing clean, clear and reliable data in a standard format.
The CCIS is based on a unique "client code" to be assigned by IATA to any corporate travel buyer that applies. Subsequently, corporates add this code to each reservation that they make. This opens the way for a simple and consistent approach to monitor travel costs, irrespective of where tickets are bought.
IATA-issued codes will reduce travel agents' work. The codes need only to be added to the corporate travel buyer's profile for automatic or PF-key combination insertion. While the current data available on corporations with dedicated agents is good, the data available from nondedicated agents is scarce. The CCIS can solve that problem.
The basic goal is to simplify the tracking of corporate deals by providing one method of tracking for the entire industry. Because the code appears in the passenger name record, it will enable airlines to cater to clients' other needs throughout their flying experience. For example, airlines could provide more personalized service from checkin, lounge access, excess baggage concessions and priority wait-listing, to chauffeur services and corporate extranets. The potential is there for the CCIS to significantly improve corporate relationships.
The CCIS is designed to maintain data privacy for several reasons: There are to be no client codes on the MIDT or BIDT tapes, which would provide market share data; only subscribing airlines are to receive client code data and be able to decode it, and subscribing airlines will only receive data on their own segments; the airlines and anyone else transmitting the codes (GDSs, etc.) are prohibited by provisions of CCIS from selling or exchanging this information; and the corporation will not be identified within the coding structure as the codes will be randomly assigned and composed of alphanumeric symbols to prevent identification by nonsubscribers.
IATA will only maintain the corporate code assignment and basic corporate information, i.e., name, address, phone/fax number, e-mail, etc. There will be no deal information, revenue or performance data, or airline or travel agency affiliation contained within the code or maintained by IATA.
The client codes are consensual. Corporations enter into negotiated air travel agreements voluntarily. The CCIS, while providing no additional data than can already be obtained today, will provide a standard reporting and tracking method that will benefit corporates, airlines, alliances, travel agents, travel managers and consultants. IATA is keen to launch this service as soon as possible.
<I>Mike Muller is the assistant director of passenger services for the International Air Transport Association.