Effective immediately, Iata has scrapped charges for travel agents to access its Travel Industry Designator Service (Tids).
“As the digital transformation of the industry ramps up, industry-wide standard identification of sales intermediaries has become critical. To facilitate this, Iata Tids will be free of charge,” said Iata in a recent statement.
Tids is an Iata programme that provides a unique identification code for travel agents who are not Iata-accredited. It allows suppliers, from airlines, hotels, cruise lines, car-rental companies, theme parks and rail companies, to recognise the travel agency’s individual sales.
As new booking sources and platforms emerge in the distribution space, industry suppliers face a growing challenge to identify the spend produced by booking and sales intermediaries. Iata has revamped its Tids programme to address these needs and to make Tids the standard identification for non-Iata-accredited agents, says the association.
Iata is also launching new features for Tids, including a new information management platform that will allow agents to self-manage their online profile. This simplifies the complexity and cost for agents to manage multiple industry IDs, as it provides a single place to update changes to their information, and these are automatically relayed to all suppliers using Iata’s agency list.
“In this unprecedented situation, owing to COVID-19, we hope this action helps our Tids partners to immediately benefit from Iata’s improved platform,” said Iata’s head of travel and tourism, Harsha Krishnan.
Owner of Travel VIP, Paula Varges Martini, said it was great news that the Tids charges had been dropped. She said Tids was an excellent platform for ITCs, as it allowed them to track their individual spend with suppliers such as hotels and car-rental companies, regardless of whether the agency had its own Iata number.
“The ability for suppliers to be able to track individual sales generated by a particular travel agent gives the agent far more credibility when negotiating with travel suppliers.”
Paula recently signed up for Iata’s GoLite option and said the cost of the programme had amounted to R18 000 for her agency so far. She said, in comparison, the Tids programme, which is now completely free of charge, was an excellent option for agents who did not want their own Iata number for ticketing.
