The Challenge of Remaining FAA Compliant
Under the terms of the US Fly America Act (FAA), all air travel and cargo transportation services funded by the US federal government are required to use a certified "U.S. flag" air carrier service (with some exemptions e.g. when a US air carrier is not available). This applies to NGOs receiving funding from the USAID budget.
One of our customers based in Switzerland, receives such funds from the US federal government and required the support of Key Travel to be sure they are compliant with the FAA rules especially for bookings made online. The organisation wanted to increase its online adoption (adoption rate close to 0%) as that is the lowest cost booking channel, so that booking offline is only used for the most complex journeys. However, the need to be FAA compliant was a barrier to achieving this objective.
The Problem of Remaining FAA Compliant
For offline bookings, we could provide the customer with an audit trail for FAA compliance. Key Travel’s offline agents support and train their bookers in making choices that meet FAA criteria and the booker is able to save emails as evidence of why their choice was made. The online booking tool, however, was not able to save the justifications and reasoning of the choices and therefore no trail was available for the regular audits.
Our Solution to Remaining FAA Compliant
We implemented on our online booking tool a technical solution which built alerts, blockers and specific codes relating to flight choices to ensure 100% FAA compliance which is fully auditable
The Results
- Since the end of July 2023, our customer has been fully satisfied with our FAA compliance configuration.
- They fully trust the content thanks to the alerts, and they know exactly whether every booking is FAA compliant or not.
- Because of the specific codes implemented, they can report easily to their auditors.
- Online adoption has increased from 0% in June 2023 – 96% in Nov/Dec 2023.