We do! I worked with our Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) to create our form a couple years ago; the form is housed on their website. I believe we used Stanford's as a baseline to create our version. The form must be attached to the traveler's expense report when they are submitting their airfare expenses. All international travel on sponsored projects routes to OSP for approval so they should be reviewing the airfare for compliance and following up when either the form has not been submitted or they do not qualify for a Fly America Act exemption.

Please note, I have trouble opening the form in Chrome but it always works in Firefox: https://osp.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1202/2022/06/osp_Fly-America-Act-Waiver.pdf

Similar to Rebecca, our Sponsored Programs office also hosts this process. We have Travel Rules to flag these trips and a message on our Concur Homepage regarding Fly America Act with a link to the form. The form must be attached to requests and reports regarding the travel that's out of compliance. Rebecca's form is much nicer though. Ours is in excel...

I have a couple follow up questions regarding Fly America Act and the waiver form:

1. How does your TMC assist with Fly America Act compliance and if so, how? Do they ask travelers if they're traveling on Federal Funds upfront or is the traveler responsible for sharing that information with them? If the traveler books non-compliant flights and needs to complete a waiver, does the agent help provide the documentation to verify that they qualify?
2. For travelers booking through your OBT, do you have specific tools in place to help travelers ensure they are booking compliant flights? If they book a non-compliant flight, is there any information which tells the traveler they have to document their search results?

I'm currently having a friendly argument with a faculty person on this so I'd love to hear how other research universities are tackling this!

Has anyone else using SAP Concur had issues with airlines (particularly British Airways) being flagged under the Fly America Act, even though they shouldn’t be listed as such? I believe they haven’t been subject to the Fly America requirements since 2021. Any insights?

Did you alert SAP Concur? If so, what was their response? And how did you communicate to your institution not to fly with BA if you are required to fly under the Fly America Act?

Michelle,

From what I understand, British Airways is not compliant with Fly America. The UK is no longer part of the European Union, so British Airways is not included in the Open Skies Agreement.

Hi Michelle,

We are also displaying BA with the shield icon in Concur in the new evolution of travel. We logged a case with our TMC's online team since it should not be displayed from my understanding of Fly America/Open Skies.

We've had multiple issues with flights being flagged as FAA compliant when they are not. This has recently included a round-trip flight with all legs on Qatar Airways (which has NEVER been compliant), a multi-carrier flight which included a leg on British Airways and a leg on Ethiopian, and a round-trip flight on British Airways. We are indirect on Concur Travel so we've requested that our TMC submit a support cases when these issues arise. Concur responded in mid-February that the issue with British Airways has been resolved but it certainly appears that that is not the case.

Thanks Rebecca, we are seeing it with other non-compliant airlines as well so good to know it's not a unique issue but better yet if it wasn't an issue at all. Last month it resulted in a department needing to fund $12k in tickets unexpectedly that from our guidance (Fly America shield) appeared to be acceptable to travelers at the time of booking.

When Concur marked the flights as FAA-compliant, are you sure they didn't qualify under one of the many exceptions to the rules? Examples:

There are a lot of ways flights on non-U.S. carriers can be compliant, and you sometimes have to dig a lot to find out. You may already be aware. I thought I'd share anyway, as there might be others reading like me who don't or didn't fully understand all the intricacies.

Good points Justin. I am sure the scenarios we have been raising with our TMC and Concur do not fall under any exception. Many of our trips are funded through DOD or other military sources such as ONR and don't have flexibility for Open Skies exceptions. Unfortunately, the particular scenarios we have encountered also do not fall under any other exception. Most exceptions aren't easily determined by the booking tool and require a human to assess whether one is applicable. I am not a Fly America expert but have unfortunately had to become much more familiar with the release of the new travel experience.

Agreed, I think the issue the booking tool has is that it cannot discern which legs of a flight do or do not qualify for an exception. So if some legs are compliant and/or if some legs qualify for an exception, the entire flight may be flagged as compliant incorrectly. But the British Airways issue just seems to be old programming that is still lingering around from when the UK was part of the EU (strictly my opinion on this). It's not an easy thing to understand from the start so I can only imagine how hard the programming is. But we can't afford to continuously find non-federal funding to pay for these errors.