By SEAN DOUGLAS Tuesday, April 8 2008

BRITISH Airways (BA) is cutting the commission paid to travel agents selling its tickets from a current six percent of the ticket value to just one percent, for trips starting from outside the Caribbean.

In a statement, BA announced: “The six percent standard commission shall be retained for journeys originating in any Caribbean island except for Turks and Caicos, Bahamas and Cayman Islands.”

BA said in the three territories, the commission is one percent on all journeys regardless of origin.

“The change reflects market conditions such as the prevalence of travel agency fees as well as the need to appropriately manage our distribution costs...The services offered by travel agents will always be driven by customer needs and agents are free to charge their own service fees in addition to the ticket price, as British Airways does when customers book directly through our call centre.” In a reaction, Hollis Kam of Kam’s Travel and Tours Limited of Long Circular Mall, St James yesterday said that this was the first time he was hearing the news.

He remarked that since the demise of BWIA, the only way to get from Trinidad and Tobago to London was via British Airways, which is Caribbean Airlines (CA) partner in taking CA passengers on the Barbados-to-London leg of the journey.

However, Kam was glad that the bulk of his firm’s ticket sales were for flights originating in the Caribbean, for which commissions would not be cut, saying only 10 to 15 percent of tickets sold by local agencies were for flights starting outside the region.

‘So, if we are doing something out of London, we will charge a service charge for that.” He said in fact that American Airlines and Delta already give TT-based travel agents no commission on tickets for flights originating from the United States.