Posts Tagged "ARC"

My agency’s helpdesk not only supports our selected E-Gov Travel system, but all the associated questions that go along with it. A primary area is the Federal Travel Regulations. While seemingly straight-forward, there are many gray areas that are left to agency discretion. In fact, there are about 14 areas in the FTR that an agency must have a policy about such as the size of rental car to authorize, the amount of telephone calls to reimburse, the transportation method most advantageous to the government, etc. Often there is a something different to a policy question that makes it unique and has to be researched. In order to accomplish this, we have a Departmental travel contact for the agency’s Bureaus that assits. After that, we verify with...

In order to manage business travel efficiently and maintain conformance with policy regulations, companies issue travel procedures that govern travel planning and cost reporting.  Owing to the many available travel options, the travel procedures provide detailed instructions for compliance. When making travel arrangements, employees are obligated to give primary consideration to the best interests of the company and any sponsors. The company expects employees to apply good judgment and professional integrity when planning business travel, in accordance with a code of ethics and to make travel plans at the lowest available cost. However, all corporate preferred travel programs experience some leakage at one point or another.   The loss of transactions through...

Following the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, domestic airline members of the Air Transport Association (ATA) operating the Area Settlement Plan (ASP), that had agreed to and signed the ARC Carrier Service Agreement, created the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC).  This Arlington VA based, self-governing corporation, appoints travel agencies to sell airline tickets and oversees the financial details of tracking payments to airlines and the disbursement of commissions to travel agencies for the United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.  It processes approximately 150 million ticket transactions per year for its customers, which now include approximately 30,000 travel agents, and more than 150 domestic and international participating airline and...

I have been employed in the travel industry for almost 3 years. Although I didn’t have any previous travel experience at the time I was hired I was given a position on the agents support team and learned about the aspects of travel authorizations, profiles, working queues, schedule changes and ticketing. Later, still with relatively little experience I was given the opportunity to serve our clients as Client Service Representative and point of contact for our government accounts.  This position has allowed me to increase my knowledge of aspects of the travel industry in areas such as the new account set up and implementation, quality control procedures, premium class travel, debit memo’s,  government travel contracts, and account credit card...

My government agency not only uses the imbedded TMC in E-Gov Travel, we also use an accommodated TMC.  In addition, we also have a task order on the GSA TSS Schedule (Travel Services Solutions) with a TMC that is used apart from E-Gov Travel for telephone reservations only. We have a mechanism to still prepare the authorizations and vouchers for travel in our E-Gov Travel system and record the transportation expense. We are glad that our chosen E-Gov Travel vendor recently allowed more TMCs to participate in E-Gov Travel. Prior to E-Gov Travel, we created our own independent contract for travel management services, since the existing GSA contract was non-mandatory. One thing the travelers find cumbersome is the fee process. It’s difficult for the...

Travel agents are accredited by either ARC in North America or IATA in other parts of the world to sell airline tickets and other related travel services. ARC provides the airlines involved with services like accreditation of travel agents, uniform documents like air tickets, a computer system to report sales and remit the proceeds and finally a repository of information and data. On the other hand accredited Travel Agents have to follow ARC & Airlines rules in providing the services to the passengers. IATA by the way is the organization that established the 3 letter codes for airports that is used to identify to make bookings (PNRS) in GDS or facilitate bag connections. The FTR are accessible through the GDS. Those agents that wish to work with the Government...

It’s a known fact that keeping track of employee’s unused tickets is undeniably difficult.  Most companies struggle with employees who will purchase and or cancel directly with the airlines (usually against company policy), or those that chose not to do anything when a trip is cancelled.  If and when these situations occur, Travel Management Companies cannot obtain ticket information for future use.   Travelers often don’t say anything until they receive their credit card statement and are seeking compensation for the cancelled trip. Due to the many tickets that are written off due to lack of re-use or not recalled by the TMC, our organization needed to come up with a sure fire way to use up the hundreds of tickets before they expire.   We have...

The GSA (General Services Administration) often enters into City-Pairs negotiations hampered by a relative lack of hard data on Government travel.  Where substantive data has been available it has not been as detailed or as encompassing as the Government requires to effectively support negotiations.  This lack of effective data caused the Travel Program management Office (PMO) of the GSA to conduct an Full and Open competition for a vendor that could provide services to make up for this lack of information.  The solicitation requirement was to obtain the best travel data aggregation and reporting solution that satisfied government requirements at the best value.  A trade-off analysis was performed between technical and cost and past performance to make the...