The Beacon: Advocacy in the Time of COVID

First off, thank you to my friend and collaborator Jennifer Wilson-Buttigieg for introducing me and this column a few weeks back!

At a recent ASTA conference, one of the speakers highlighted the importance of “showing your work.” When you as an advisor work in a transparent fashion with your clients – when they see all the work you do to make get them to their destination and back without a hitch – they value what you do all the more.

That’s what I’ll try to do here – to show you, especially non-members and not particularly active members – all the work we put in in Washington, D.C. to promote and defend your businesses and our part of the travel industry more broadly.

That work changed dramatically in March of 2020. Government advocacy has always been a central part of ASTA’s mission – and we had had a string of wins in the late 2010s ranging from independent contractor rules in California to killing proposed sales tax expansions in multiple states. But overnight it went from important to almost life-and-death, at least in terms of the survival of our member businesses.

Starting in those fateful days, we have faced lockdowns, border closures, and a complete cessation of cruising – all as a result of the government’s response to COVID-19. And when crisis struck, ASTA and its members responded – on a scale that dwarfed our previous lobbying campaigns. Since the onset of COVID, we have conducted over 450 Congressional meetings, a number that includes those conducted during ASTA Legislative Day 2021 in May. We have run 28 separate federal and state grassroots campaigns, resulting in 30,000 people sending emails and making phone calls to elected officials to the tune of 120,000 advocacy contacts. Compare this to our previous record of 2,900 people participating in the California Assembly Bill 5 campaign in 2019 (see above).

Thanks to these efforts, ASTA members had access to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), unemployment benefits – expanded to include independent contractors for the first time in history – and other programs to help them get through the trauma of COVID-19. At the same time, we worked with our supplier partners to restart cruising and prevent the worst of the proposed COVID restrictions from going through.

While we are seeing green shoots of late, we still have a long way to go. We recently fielded a member survey, which showed that average agency revenue levels are still down 71% as compared to the same time in 2019. And due to the dreaded “commission lag,” there will be a substantial gap between a return of travel bookings and a corresponding return of business income – an anticipated average of eight months’ delay.

So, we fight on, at both the federal and state levels. From the feds, the support we need really falls into two buckets. First, additional relief for hard-hit businesses like ours. Our favored approach is the proposed SAVE Act to include travel agencies in the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program and a restoration/extension of the ERTC, which the recently-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill maddeningly repealed for the fourth quarter of 2021. (You can weigh in with Congress on both of these issues on our website.) The Senate will soon consider a $1 trillion-plus social spending “reconciliation” bill, which will provide an opportunity to fix the ERTC, while both the House and Senate small business committees are reportedly preparing targeted small business relief bills, a chance to insert the SAVE Act or something like it.

Second, we need international travel to get back on a trajectory toward 2019 levels. We are seeing some great momentum here, but much work remains, including everything from harmonizing international entry restrictions to modifying CDC’s inbound testing rule so vaccinated Americans are not at risk of being stranded overseas to the continued development of interoperable digital health systems.

You, dear readers, can help in these fights. We are not some shadowy group in Washington that uses the dark arts of lobbying to get what we want. We are the national trade association for travel agencies and advisors – we are you. If you’re not a member of ASTA, please consider joining today. It needs to be said – the work we do benefits all travel professionals, not just those who are ASTA members, and while we are exceedingly proud of having grown our membership network to 17,000 there remain tens of thousands who don’t participate. Beyond joining, you can engage in our grassroots advocacy campaigns at ASTA.org/Advocacy and can also make a contribution to our political action committee (“ASTAPAC”) at ASTA.org/Donate.

As the great Ben Franklin said, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” With this Godforsaken pandemic moving into the rear-view mirror, I say – let’s hang together.

Future columns will focus more on the day-to-day of what we’re doing on Capitol Hill, but I wanted to use the first one to set the stage in terms of where we’ve been and where we’re going. Thanks for coming along for the ride!