British Airways has found a way to make easy money by abusing the ADM system; but it will be the one to lose out in the long run.
Arabian Travel News (ATN) held it's first ever travel agent roundtable in Doha last month, and discovered that agents there face many of the same issues as agents elsewhere in the Gulf — not least the debacle of airline ADM abuse which has been exposed in this magazine as one of the most scandalous practices an airline could possibly hope to get away with in its dealings with the trade.
I left Doha feeling utterly dismayed and appalled at the extent to which my own national airline appears to be bending the rules to its own advantage in a bid to squeeze cash out of travel agents —just because it seems it can.
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British Airways has apparently found an easy way to make money — and lots of it — out of people like Purakot Balakrishnan, a travel agent who instead of saving his hard-earned salary, has been forced to forfeit nearly $6,000 of it — a substantial sum in anyone's book, and one that is taking him years to earn — to BA, for an inserting a code in the wrong box when he made a BA booking.
The situation sounds ludicrous doesn't it? But sadly it's a reality. And Balakrishnan is not the only one. Since we have featured his story online I have been contacted by travel agents from across the Gulf — from Damman to Doha — who have also been forced to pay BA what can amount to months of their own pay, for similarly arbitrary reasons.
As a revenue-driving strategy these tactics may be working brilliantly for BA in the short-term, (after all in what other industry could you actually fine your distributor four times the value of your product just for making a sale for you?)
But as business strategies go it doesn't bode well for the future of BA in the region. Travel agents tell me they have had their fingers burnt and are too scared to touch the airline now with a bargepole —and can you blame them?
We look forward to a response from BA and hope the airline will seize this opportunity to start mending crucial relationships with travel trade across the Middle East before it's too late.
After all, bullies never win in the end.
As the voice of the Middle East travel trade, we want to hear your news and views.
Email the editor at monika.canty@itp.com
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Nov 29, 2011 , Qatar
Absolutely right Monika thank you very much for getting this issue out into the open. We travel agents have been ridden rough shod by this airline for far too long now. There needs to be some transparency and proper procedures put in place in the way airlines deal wiht the travel trade. In this c...
Nov 28, 2011 , Kuwait
So very true. Is this suppose to be a diverse way of making money with BA? They need to be boycotted as so many times before!!