ASTA’s Zane Kerby Talks American Airlines, Fraud, and Road Ahead

During last week’s Travel Advisor Convention, TMR sat down to talk with ASTA’s president and CEO Zane Kerby on a variety of topics, not the least of which was the U-turn by American Airlines on its NDC-AAdvantage plans.

The news broke just as more than 1,000 members of the U.S. travel trade were gathering in Dallas, coincidentally the home of American’s headquarters, for ASTA’s annual Travel Advisor Conference. The timing and location couldn’t have been scripted any better.

“It’s a big deal,” Kerby told TMR. “It’s an acknowledgement that our profession is important and it should not have been ignored. We’re grateful Mr. Isom is going to work with the travel advisor community, and not against us, going forward.”

It’s a win for ASTA, but also for sister organizations in Canada (ACTA) and other trade associations in North America and Europe.

“Having the support of our sister trade associations was extremely helpful and it bolstered our arguments to members of the government,” Kerby said.

As to what’s going to happen next, there are reports that American is moving forward with its Preferred Agency program that was tied to the NDC move, though the airline has yet to reveal what that will look like. 

For ASTA, the message has always been that the trade is not averse to change, and particularly not averse to technology change. It just wants its airline partners to be collaborative when big changes need to be made, which is what it is pushing for now.

“It should be a really collaborative process to get the tech company, the airline, and the industry working together. We had people come in talking about the process and say they had difficulty trying to sign up [for] one foreign airline [the airline’s NDC content]. To get [to] one airline online that didn’t have nearly the amount of business that they had with American airlines,” Kerby told TMR.

“The application for NDC was in 2013 or 2014 to the DOT, so I understand them getting antsy and wanting to move quickly. But forcing the undeveloped technology and using sticks not carrots in order to push people past their breaking points” was not the correct move, and proved as much for American.

Advisors as an answer to fraud
Aside from the celebration of the American news, and then preparation for what’s next, last week’s conference was also focused on ASTA’s Verified Travel Advisor (VTA) program. The VTA is a certification program that ASTA sees as a way to mark true travel professional in the U.S. 

Being able to mark an advisor as a true, trusted, ASTA-backed professional is also a way to combat the increasingly rampant fraud in the industry.

“Travel is attractive for people who are nefarious. It’s an aspirational activity, with a relatively high cost. It’s an important part of people’s lives. People work hard for 48 or 50 weeks a year so they can make magical memories for their families,” Kerby said.

The VTA program will alert consumers, who are aware of the rampant fraud, that they can book with these advisors, who are certified, and feel good about it. People who are brand new to the industry might not be able to hold themselves to that level yet, Kerby told TMR, which is why there are barriers to the VTA program (newer entrants should start with ASTA’s roadmap course). 

What should make consumers even more confident is that ASTA has a dispute resolution process for VTA. ASTA will step in and dissolve a dispute between consumers and VTA-advisors if something does come up. If ASTA is unable to resolve it, the association will take punitive action, going so far as stripping that member of their VTA designation.

“It’s about putting forward the very best of our industry,” he told TMR.

The road ahead
Kerby sees the biggest divide in ASTA’s membership between advisors who are trying to do everything on their own, and those who own agencies and have people who report to them, two very different groups with different needs and wants, all of whom ASTA is tasked with representing.

What unites those two groups is the need for visibility, which ASTA sees as one of the issues intrinsic to its mission.

“The biggest need people who are selling travel have is visibility. Very few consumers outside of the travel industry know who they are. In that way, the challenge is to speak with one voice and help them understand that with this profession, although it is less visible than it has been in previous generations, it’s still there and it can really help you,” he said.

Looking ahead, ASTA will continue work on lifting the merchant of record burden for advisors when it comes to airline refunds. That fight, and others that the Association inevitably takes up this year, will be made a bit more difficult by election season.

“No one on either political side of the aisle wants to give a win. That’s why we fought so hard on the FAA reauthorization bill,” he said.

In terms of business for the rest of the year, Kerby sees strong demand continuing not just compared to the pandemic, but because of it.

“The environment feels very strong and bullish and positive to me. I think people realized that they were hemmed in and controlled and constrained during the pandemic. They realized this freedom that they took for granted can be taken for them,” he said. “I don’t think that the pain has worn off. I think people understand it now in a visceral way.”