British Airways is positioning itself as “a voice of reason” in the on-going debate over possible changes to the way UK travel agents pay for tickets.
Certain airlines are thought to be pushing Iata to alter the current Billing and Settlement Plan, making agents pay weekly rather than monthly.
However, Drew Crawley, British Airways’ chief operating officer, said the carrier was not one of the airlines leading the latest debate.
“We are providing a degree of measured response we are concerned with the number of defaults here in the UK and they have been going up,” he said.
“We are also mindful that we have a distribution, which apart those who default, works quite well and we don’t want to hobble in particular some of the small and medium sized enterprises who rely on that to grow their businesses and them growing their businesses grows the economy and we benefit eventually so there’s this balance.”
BA currently gives accredited agents about 50 days of credit. Varying remittance was a possibility but Crawley said that at the moment any change could not be justified because of additional administrative overhead costs.
