The International Air Transport Association is an international industry trade group of airlines. It is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the International Civil Aviation Organization also is. The main goal of the organization is to assist airline companies to achieve lawful competition and uniformity in prices.
International Air Transport Association
Tasks
IATA is trying to simplify processes in the aviation business. This concerns, for example, the standardization of tickets and baggage transport. This means that passengers can travel with several airlines with a single booking and do not have to worry about their baggage. The same applies to cargo handling.
The association organizes - with the exception of the USA - the settlement of airline tickets issued by travel agencies with IATA licenses worldwide. Every year, more than 400 million tickets are issued via the system. In addition, IATA influences the pricing of international air travel.
It produces anonymised statistics for airlines so that they can benchmark themselves against other market players.
IATA codes provide for the identifiability of airports, airlines and aircraft types. IATA codes for airports have three digits, for airlines two. There are "controlled duplicates", and codes may also have been assigned to several airlines with a time difference; therefore, IATA codes do not allow a clear assignment, a shortcoming that brings the use of the ICAO codes, each extended by one digit, into discussion.
In addition, safety standards are defined and also controlled, which are binding for all members.
However, the organization also offers support to startup airlines, government agencies, airports, etc.
IATA is financed not only by membership fees (at least $15,000 per year), but also by the sale of services, manuals, statistics and electronic documents.
History
The founding of the predecessor organisation in 1919, i.e. only one year after the end of the First World War, showed that the increased economic possibilities of air transport, which were made possible by the technical advances achieved during the war, were soon recognised.
Shortly before the end of the Second World War, IATA was re-established on 19 April 1945 in the Hotel Nacional in Havana. At the time of its re-establishment, it had 57 members from 31 predominantly European and North American nations.
One of their main functions was price-fixing and service agreements in international air transport, which were effective until the 1990s or until about 2006, when they were terminated for antitrust reasons, as were other similar arrangements.
IATA originally planned to introduce electronic airline tickets worldwide by the end of 2007. This is expected to bring savings of up to $3 billion a year for the international air transport industry. This will bring a saving of nine dollars per booking and 50,000 fewer trees cut down each year. For this reason, 16.5 million tickets were ordered from seven printers for the last time on August 27, 2007. By May 31, 2008, the paper tickets were distributed to the 60,000 travel agencies and since June 1, 2008, only so-called e-tickets have been issued.