ASTA Kicks Off Travel Advisor Conference with Commitment to Do More for Members

The American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA) this week gathered once again for its annual travel advisor conference, this time in San Diego at the city’s Gaylord Pacific Resort.

This year’s conference marked the first time the event was in San Diego since 2017, and the first time ASTA has held the conference without its president and CEO Zane Kerby since 2012, the year before his tenure began as ASTA head. Kerby was absent because he was dealing with a back injury, that required surgery and kept him from getting on a plane this week. 

ASTA Executive VP of Industry Affairs Mark Meader, who helped fill in for Kerby onstage, said on Thursday that Kerby “missing the conference is probably harder than the surgery itself. I know that because I’ve been talking to him a lot.”

This year’s conference also marked the one-year anniversary of ASTA launching its hotel reporting tool that gave advisors the chance to report on unpaid commissions from hotel bookings, a common problem for a lot of members. So far, 160 cases have been filed and 120 of those cases have been resolved, allowing ASTA to return more than $25,000 in unpaid commissions for advisors.

“That’s real money and that’s your money,” Meader said onstage.

ASTA is now planning on expanding that tool beyond hotels and beyond unpaid commissions to tackle other forms of bad supplier behavior, problems that are “diminishing the value of your work,” Meader added. That includes things like late commission payments, suppliers direct marketing to clients, and the like.

The expanded tool is being designed to evolve into a generic portal to accommodate any type of supplier issue, regardless of what kind of supplier it is. According to ASTA Senior VP and General Counsel Peter Lobasso, the tool will serve as a way of aggregating all that information to track anything that would tend to undermine the agency distribution channel, allowing ASTA to decipher what’s what, organize the data, and see if there is a broader commonality.

The plan is for the tool to launch to members soon.

The move matches ASTA’s sharp focus on Non-Commissionable Fares (NCFs). Addressing why NCFs are top of mind for ASTA now, Meader explained that there is a deep concern that travel advisors indeed be compensated for the true value of the business they bring to the supplier. When portions of that business get excluded, Meader called the practice “egregious.”

At the same time, ASTA is continuing to highlight the suppliers that do right by advisors, including the ones, like Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania, and Viking, who have opted for no-NCF policies, many of whom were onstage during the general session this week.

Speaking to TMR, Meader said that “we listen to our members and listen to what they tell us as much from an industry perspective as we do for the government side.” Meader and ASTA’s team see its advocacy work as two-pronged: one to the government, and two to the industry. The no-NCF push and the bad behavior call-outs are both part of that industry advocacy.