Originally Posted by
Reifel
Working myself for a IATA agent, obviously much smaller in size, I am a bit suprised though.
As an IATA Agent, for tickets issued via BSP or ARC, you need to pay for all your issued tickets either weekly or monthly, but mosty bi-weekly. depending on the payment cycle you agreed. This is after the ticket is issued (and not after the guests travels). While most tickets will therefore be paid by the time the traveller flies, indeed it can happen that for tickets for last minute bookings, passengers have travelled before airlines are paid.
That said, amongst others for that reason IATA requires their agent to have a financial guarantee (i.e. through a bank or insurance) to cover for the next payment cycle. The amount of this guarantee is reviewed regularly depending on your revenues made.
I can only imagine those OTA have a direct link with the airline to avoid processing through GDS and BSP/ARC to save money to airline and OTA (GDS bookings produce costs, especially on the airline side), but even then I would expect an airline to make sure that the travel agent can cover their debts in case of bankruptcy, but I would believe this is then not as tightly controlled anymore as it's only something between airline and agent, and IATA or BSP/ARC are not involved anymore.
Appreciate your feedback as you are obviously much more familiar with this topic than most of us here.
One thing I was wondering is if the size may have played a role here. The news reports that Tripsta started building a debt 'to the airlines' from 2015 onwards. Perhaps, exactly because Tripsta was doing such huge volumes, airlines and/or GDS were more accepting of this behaviour than they would be towards a smaller TA..
From what I understand Tripsta is blaming Travelport for its demise. This, kind of, implies that a large part of the debt is with them - otherwise Travelport would not be able to cause such a sudden cash problem at Tripsta. So the Travelport GDS seems to be involved in some way or another...though both parties are very silent on their exact role.