2009 Articles
9 February 2009
Travel Weekly
UATP to add hotels, car rental companies as merchants
Article in Travel Weekly
Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP), which supplements the ARC and IATA settlement systemswith processing for air purchases made with the UATP card, intends to expand its merchantbase this year to hotels and car rental companies.
Company spokeswoman Wendy Ward said UATP is making the move because holders of theUATP corporate card have been asking for it. “We have major corporations that want to puteverything on the UATP card,” Ward said, but they cannot do so at the moment.
Originally, UATP merchants were airlines, and the ARC and IATA systems provided settlement.
However, today some travel agents and rail carriers are UATP merchants, as well, with UATP handling the processing.
In the case of agents, this is typically for the purpose of processing payments whencorporate customers use the UATP card to pay service fees or for the purchase of packagefares, net fares or consolidator fares.
UATP launched its in-house settlement service, called UATP Settlement Services (USS), in2003. UATP says the system offers settlement in multiple currencies and with no currencyconversion fees, a selling point.
