Tip of the Week: Entering a Penalty in IAR

If you forgot to include a penalty or change fee when you have issued an exchange or refund in your GDS, you should manually enter the penalty amount in the “Admin/Penalty” field in IAR. This field appears on the Exchange Support and Refund Details screens.

Any change fee or penalty applicable in a GDS-issued exchange or refund is sent to ARC with a tax code of "CP." IAR recognizes this CP code as a Cancellation Penalty/Reissue Fee and automatically moves the associated amount to the Admin/Penalty field. Although CP is a valid code when received from a GDS, IAR will not allow the manual entry of CP as a tax code. Any attempt to manually enter CP as a tax in IAR will result in an error displayed as "ERROR – Invalid Tax Code." The taxes that appear on or are entered on the Exchange Support and Refund Details screens should only include the unused values from the original sale.

For exchanges, you can also use the “Adjustment” field on the IAR Exchange Summary screen. This field is an IAR-only shortcut that can be used to either increase or decrease the value of an exchange in your sales report. Any amount entered in the Adjustment field has the same effect as entering a penalty amount. Using the Adjustment field saves you the step of moving back to the Exchange Support screen to update the “Admin/Penalty” field. At settlement, the Adjustment and Admin/Penalty fields are added together and reported to the carrier as a single Admin/Penalty amount.

It is not possible to automatically populate the Adjustment field from a GDS entry, because there is no GDS or carrier equivalent field. If you know that exchanging a fully unused ticket will result in a non-refundable, non-transferable, "use-it-or-lose-it" balance. In that case, you can simply add that balance to the penalty amount before issuing the exchange, and the transaction will interface to IAR with the correct total exchange value.