As our industry continues to work together to provide travelers with improved retailing experiences, it becomes increasingly important for agencies and airlines to have accurate and timely transaction data for customer service purposes as well as revenue and financial forecasting. To enable these improvements, beginning in 2025, ARC plans to expedite the output of settled transaction data by several hours following the close of the weekly reporting period.
Why is this process update important?
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Faster Customer Refunds. The change will accelerate customer refunds/exchanges issued on Mondays and Sundays by one day.
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Quicker Access to Settled Sales Data. Both travel agencies and airlines will have faster access to sales data to better project revenues and cash flow. The timeliness of agency sales data availability to airlines currently lags the airline-direct channel. The acceleration of settled data reduces this gap helping to ensure the agency channel remains competitive with airlines’ own channels.
How does this impact you? Effective January 13, 2025, ARC will require travel agencies to authorize their weekly sales reports by 1:59:59 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) (excluding Monday and Tuesday holiday weeks). This is a change from the current authorization deadline of 11:59:59 p.m. ET.
While more than 70% of ARC reports are already routinely authorized before the new deadline of 1:59:59 p.m. ET, we understand that for some agencies this change will require updates to internal processes and/or staff scheduling. This is why we are giving ample notice of this change. Ensuring your agency has time to prepare should this change in schedule impact your operations will make for a successful transition.
To prepare for this change, ARC recommends travel agencies that have not already done so begin reconciling sales reports daily. Daily reconciling will reduce the time commitment to clear errors at the end of the weekly reporting period. For exchange transactions, it is important to ensure any residual value MCO/EMD is correctly linked to the primary exchange, so the transaction is accurately balanced before settlement. Additional best practices can be found on arccorp.com.
Thank you in advance for your focus on this very important process change. If you have questions or require additional assistance, please contact our Customer Care team at 1-855-816-8003 or ccchelp@arccorp.com. They’ll be listening for ways we can further prepare you.
Over the past year, fraud cases increased throughout the travel industry and affected travel agencies at an alarmingly high rate. At ARC, we aim to ensure you have the knowledge necessary to protect yourself from these latest fraud schemes.
Due to these growing fraud concerns and to comply with the new Payment Card Industry (PCI) 4.0 requirements, ARC will require your adoption of Multifactor Authentication (MFA) if provided by your technology provider (e.g., aggregator, GDS). These provisions are countermeasures against social engineering and phishing attacks intended to collect valid credentials from unsuspecting users for fraudulent purposes.
The two ways to satisfy the MFA requirement are:
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Use a combination of two or more authentication factors as the system provider requires.
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Use a Single Sign-on Service (SSO) concurrently with MFA internally in place. With this option, the user gains access through a federated identity management arrangement requiring two or more authentication factors.
These updated security recommendations are to protect you and your airline partners from the growing sophistication of cyber criminals’ attempts to gain unauthorized access to agency ticketing tools.
Please contact your technology providers for any questions relating to their MFA requirements.
What is PCI? The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 4.0 is a compliance framework intended for entities that store, process or transmit payment account data, entities accepting or processing payment transactions, and for developers and manufacturers of software and devices used in those transactions. The PCI DSS compliance framework comprises a baseline of technical and operational requirements designed to protect cardholder data.
ARC is making updates to the ARA and CTDRA that will take effect on August 26, 2024. View a summary of the updates and a full review of the changes coming to the ARA and CTDRA using the links below.
Changes to ARA:
Changes to CTDRA:
Please note, in accordance with Section 5 of the ARA, your continued participation with ARC after August 26, 2024, serves as your acceptance of the amendments.
Agencies with less than 1,000 transactions per quarter will not be assessed transaction fees. A separate debit representing this fee will be drawn against the applicable ARC-designated bank accounts on or after July 18, 2024. Only one draft will be issued for consolidated drafting agencies.
If you have not done so already, every agency must contact your bank representative and add ARC’s Company ID 9521367276.
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Number of Transactions per Quarter |
Price per Transaction |
|
Tier 1 |
1,000 – 2,224,999 |
$0.014 |
|
Tier 2 |
2,225,000 – 5,999,999 |
$0.013 |
|
Tier 3 |
6,000,000 or more |
$0.012 |
ARC will notify travel agencies in an email to the primary administrator or operational contact on the account before each quarterly draft. For consolidated drafting agencies, only one draft will be assessed for all ARC-accredited locations.
Please note: There is a $25 nonrefundable fee for all returned drafts.
Although access to IAR is granted from My ARC, the My ARC Administrator or IAR Administrator must complete the user set up directly in IAR. The program automatically defaults to the “View Only” user role when a new user is given access. In IAR, user roles control what a user can do in a Sales Report.
Depending on a user’s role, fields in IAR will either be active, disabled or hidden. Users will only be able to perform actions they have the right to perform. Only Administrators may decide and assign the appropriate IAR role and ARC# Group (Standard or a custom Access Group created by the Administrator) directly in IAR.
To do so, the Administrator should follow these steps in IAR:
1. Select the Administration global header at the top right section of the IAR display.
2. Find the user’s profile and select the EDIT button.
3. Select a User Role from the dropdown menu.
4. Select a User Group (or groups) from the Available Groups column and move it to the Selected Groups column using the arrow buttons.
5. Click the SUBMIT button.
6. The message “Are you sure you wish to modify this user's profile settings?” will appear. Click YES.
7. If successful, the message “The user profile has been modified - These changes will take effect the next time the user logs into IAR 2.0.” will appear.