Emily,

You are not alone! We received the same news that our contract is being terminated. My counterpart who manages our contracts spoke to the Customer Success team yesterday and didn’t get much information, unfortunately. They wouldn’t disclose what the threshold is to maintain a contract. They also had minimal information to share on the new Loyalty points program but said we could sign up to learn more.

We are incredibly frustrated by this change and certainly want to drive market share to other carriers to the extent possible. AA is also a major carrier for our program so we can’t stop flying them all together. But we are contemplating similar ideas as Pitt.

Thanks for asking!
Rebecca Spanos
UNC-Chapel Hill

We will not be opting in to this program. It seems to benefit the airline and the traveler more than the university's interests and ability to help our travelers when needed. I will say that they are telling our travelers that the reason they can't help them and won't help them, is because they booked through a third-party company like Expedia, not true and not cooperative with their business "clients" now called "modern retailers." They are also sending our travelers this new business plan and urging them to opt in, not sure how that works if we do not. I am changing the search results in Concur as well and have prepared responses to our travelers when they ask to book directly with AA. They are receptive to the explanations, for now anyway.

I'm also being told that to opt into NDC with our OBT and TMC that there will be additional fees. I'm guessing that this airline and I believe United will follow, are pushing this to save on commissions/fees to TMCs/GDS. It's not going to help us, because those fees will now be passed on to the managed programs that wish to contain their spend and ownership over unused ticket credits, etc. Similar to how certain OBTs charged for SW direct connect in the past and didn't stop charging for sometime after SW stopped charging those fees.

Not sure if you have notice the new fare coming through from United "non-changeable" similar to basic economy. We have BE blocked and are now trying to figure out how to block this fare. For now, I've sent out warnings to our travelers not to book these fares without review through the travel office.

I'm not sure what AA's threshold is, but it seems to be 1 million/+, or close to. I'm sure that threshold will be raised and those on the lower end will have a similar choice to what they sent out recently. Currently, we are not being dropped from our corporate agreement, but we are not up for renewal yet, so we will see. I hope when United and others join NDC that they do it with more consideration to their business clients and TMCs who kept them going through many rough patches. I will give a shout out to SW, they have both choices (Direct Connect or GDS) and instead of dumping Higher Ed they have doubled down and increased support. Delta has also been very supportive to Higher Ed and their business clients.

I also thought of E&I consortium, I plan to bring this up to them as well. If we find out that the airline will honor a contract like that, I'm not hopeful, but it's worth a shot!

Please excuse any typos and grammar issues, I'm writing this in a hurry because I think it's extremely important that we keep this discussion going and push back on some of these self-serving decisions by the airline without considering their business clients.

Unfortunately the agreement/contract termination all seems like it depends on spend and if an institution tries to mandate.

The first thing that comes to mind for me from a Duty of Care perspective is as we were searching to see if we had travelers in Israel 12 days ago ... in the new way forward with AA - how would a travel team/global safety team know if there were travelers who booked travel to a country where an incident had occurred through the AA direct channel to and not in the university's managed travel program?

Excellent point, I'm also wondering about duty of care! And that we will have no access to use cancelled ticket credits without cooperation from the travelers, I'm guessing. That is a huge lose of funds to the university!

Duty of care, grant funds lost because of unused tickets not being able to be managed productively are all major concerns. Budgeting appropriately for any additional fees associated with NDC also needs to be on the radar as fiscal year 25 budgets are needing to be turned in soon.

Hi Laney, Griffin and I are meeting with E&I tomorrow. I will keep everyone posted.

Thank you, Crystal!!

Hello All,

How was the meeting with E&I meeting? Any good news?

All-

The director of Pitt's Strategic Sourcing reached out to E&I as well. I spoke to a gentleman from E&I on Friday and he shared he was taking this information to their sourcing group and would let Pitt know if this was something that could be pursued.

Thanks

They just reached out to me to schedule a meeting. Pretty sure they are cancelling our CSA and likely before it's renewal date. They are really pushing, not giving choices other than opting out, this new completely self-serving program! They are also reaching out to our travelers, so created a response for that too! I'm not doing it, it completely undermines our managed travel program and reliable service (which they do not have, or the staff to provide it), not to mention duty of care and unused ticket management (which I hear they are also removing credits already earned at end of year!). There will be no name changes available going forward as well, I heard.....