Qatar slaps agents with new ADM policy

QATAR Airways has
released a notification
to the trade that, with
immediate effect, agents
are to obtain authorisation
approval codes for all tickets
issued with credit card form
of payments. Failure to insert
a valid authorisation code will
result in ADM chargebacks to
the agents.
However, the statement also
said manual authorisations
were prohibited, which
seemed to conflict with the
initial statement that implied
that manual pre-authorisation
codes were required before
tickets could be issued.
TNW contacted Qatar
for clarification and to
understand the reasoning,
but at the time of publication,
the airline had not
responded. When TNW spoke
to a Johannesburg call centre
agent she was unaware of
the statement and advised
that internally Qatar made
use of system-generated
authorisation codes. She
could not advise if agents
were required to obtain
manual or system-generated
authorisation codes.
Obtaining and inserting
an authorisation code
will be a separate step,
with the standard practice
being for agents to issue
tickets, where obtaining an
authorisation code is an
automated back-end function
between the GDS and bank.
Stuart Kirkbright, senior
sales consultant for Sure
Voyager Travel, said obtaining
credit card authorisations
was a laborious and timeconsuming
process. Instead
of using the automated
authorisation function in the
GDS, a ticketing consultant
would instead have to call
the card holder’s bank,
provide them with detailed