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Current Issues

Hotel Occupancy Taxes. ITSA members continue to confront legislative and litigational efforts to impose taxes on the compensation they receive for facilitating the booking of hotel rooms through their websites. These tax initiatives, if not stopped, would not only be harmful to the online travel business model that played a substantial role in driving travel and tourism to very strong pre-recessionary levels, but to the traveling public and the tax-collecting authorities themselves. Counterproductive travel and tourism policy in any event, it would be particularly self-defeating in the worst recession in the past eighty years. ITSA will continue its efforts to educate policy makers all over the country to the dangers of these tax initiatives.

Cuba Travel. ITSA believes that the time has come to lift the ban on Americans to freely travel to Cuba. A policy developed for application in a divided world, it has outlived its time, and never achieved its goals of bringing about change in Cuba, anyway. ITSA believes the best way to bring about change is exposure to Americans, their culture and their values. Moreover, commercially, the ban only succeeds in ceding the market to offshore companies. So, in 2009, ITSA is supporting efforts on both sides of Capitol Hill to bring this outmoded policy to an end.

Homeland Security. The safety and security of leisure and business travelers is one of the primary concerns of ITSA and its members. ITSA meets and works with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and other units of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to improve coordination of security measures and better disseminate notice of those measures to travelers. The most clear example is with Secure Flight. ITSA submitted comments and otherwise communicated its views publicly as Secure Flight was being developed, and it remains in collaborative discussions with TSA on implementation that will be effective yet the least disruptive to travel distributors and the traveling public.

International Initiatives. The handling of CRS and other travel distribution issues in bilateral or multilateral negotiations, or those conducted under the sanction of international organizations, are of ongoing interest to ITSA members. ITSA will monitor and engage in any negotiations where the interests of its members are at stake. An example is an ongoing series of bilateral air services agreement negotiations occurring between the European Union and the U.S. and a succession of countries around the world.

Credit Card Fee Issues. ITSA has been working on three related credit card fee issues.

ITSA supports the fair negotiation of so-called "interchange fees," or the fees credit card companies charge merchants for processing charges. Unduly high and with opaque rules, interchange fees have typically been set and changed virtually at will by credit card companies. The Credit Card Fair Fees Act introduced in the House would exempt a joint negotiation by merchants from antitrust rules, and level the playing field. ITSA supports this bill.
ITSA urges a change to credit card chargeback rules that would permit electronic verification of a charge by a third-party facilitator. This would reduce the high cost of so-called "friendly fraud," by customers changing their minds about, say, a trip, as distinguished from a commercially fraudulent scheme.
ITSA supports efforts by its colleagues at the American Society of Travel Agents to halt the effort by United Airlines to transfer the costs and risks of credit card verification and fees to small travel agents and others. United's efforts, problematic in and of themselves, would be a most disruptive precedent for the industry as a whole.

Travel Promotion. ITSA continues to work with a coalition of non-member travel-focused companies, consumer and small business groups, chambers of commerce, trade associations and public policy organizations to promote business and leisure travel, in general. ITSA is supportive of the Travel Promotion Act, and encourages its adoption in 2009.

Green Travel. ITSA supports energy efficient and other aspects of green travel, and is generally supportive of initiatives that will help achieve it.

Healthy Travel. ITSA and its members support providing as much information as reasonably possible to its travelers so that they can have as healthy a travel experience as possible. A current initiative is an effort of ITSA to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on educating the traveling public about precautions to take with respect to Swine Flu while planning and taking trips.

Baggage and Other Fees. ITSA supports prompt and full disclosure of information about all of the new fees applicable to air travel. As airlines "unbundle" their fares, consumers need to have immediate, easy and understandable access to all of the new fees. Airlines should make those promptly available to the public through every travel distributor. In this connection, ITSA supports provisions in the Senate FAA Reauthorization bill directing the Transportation Security Administration to ensure that this information is made promptly and fully available.

Sellers of Travel Regulation. Some states continue to attempt to regulate sellers of travel broadly, both online and conventional, in order to remedy the actions of a few bad actors. ITSA is working with these various states to ensure that fraudulent travel schemes and other bad actions that may not be covered under existing law are targeted very directly and narrowly by any additional legislation and/or regulation. Overly broad and restrictive regulation will burden the system and penalize the overwhelming majority of sellers of travel who scrupulously observe the law, resulting in reduced consumer choice and attendant impacts on travel and tax dollars.

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