ARC Launches Tool to Reduce Debit Memos
by Michele McDonald /The Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC) officially launched Memo Analyzer, a tool that digs down into a travel agency’s debit memo patterns with a large agency group.
Doug Mangold, ARC’s managing director of product management, said the dashboard-style tool will enable travel agents to see more easily where the debit memos are coming from, what types of tickets are problematic, which routes and which advance-purchase fares are generating debit memos, and a host of other data points.
“It can go back and provide more information, like ‘Here’s what happened between JFK and London Heathrow,’” Mangold said.
Armed with the information, agents can determine the root causes of its debit memos and address them accordingly, he said.
For example, a particular agent may need more training on international ticketing or may not understand either the fare rules or an airline’s commission contract. Commissions are the No. 1 cause of debit memos, and the contracts are not always as clear as they could be.
Marketing to airlines
ARC also is marketing Memo Analyzer to airlines – airlines don’t like dealing with debit memos, either – and is close to deals with several carriers.
The tool will provide one standard view of an agency’s debit memos.
“The agent and airline data is the same,” Mangold said. “There’s no haggling over what the numbers are. It takes some of that noise out of the discussion.”
Airlines may find that they need to rewrite their fare rules so that they are more easily understood.
‘Bucket’ pricing
ARC is pricing the tool in three “buckets,” not by the size of the agency but by the size of the agency’s debit memo problem.
Agencies that act on the information Memo Analyzer provides will be able to recoup their investment in a relatively short time, Mangold said.
Mangold did not want to disclose pricing particulars but said that “for a couple of hundred debit memos a year, it wouldn’t be worth it.”
ARC designed the tool for agencies with larger debit memo volumes, some of which have created departments to deal with the problem.
Memo Analyzer is a byproduct of ARC’s Debit Memo Working Group.
The group kept asking one of ARC’s product managers to parse data for them, according to Mangold.
“He got tired of getting the calls,” he said. “So he developed Memo Analyzer so that we’d stop bugging him.”