Automated BSP Refund Application Tool – Why does a Travel Agent need this?

Background

As COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive demand for ticket refund, most of the airlines have stopped the refund authority in all the GDS systems and ask the Travel Agent to use BSPLink and issue RA, reducing the number of refunds which they need to honor in each billing period. It’s very common to see the airline circulars like the one given below (Sample figure 1)  advising the travel agents to go for BSP RA instead of automated refunds on GDS

To prepare a Refund Application (RA) manually, one staff has to login to BSPLink and go through a very lengthy process consuming at least a minimum of 5 minutes to create one RA (See figure 2 for example). 

Figure 2 – Sample RA Issue form in BSP link

All the data to be filled manually, there are lots of chances of making mistakes, and more importantly if there is any mistake there is very big chances of rejecting the RA by the airline (See figure 3 for example). So it’s very important to fill all the information correctly and completely to get the RA Approved by the airline.  Especially when it comes to the fare and taxes, the user has to enter all the tax details manually which time is really consuming (See figure 4 for example). 

In short, preparation of an error fee RA document by  manual data entry takes a minimum of five minutes contributing a huge amount of human effort as the current crisis now generates a bulk number of refund requests for each travel agent while we have all the required data for this RA process readily available in agent’s back office system and GDS.

While it has not been a comfortable journey for us either, nucore need to stand relevant here for our clients as well as other industry players facing the similar situation with our scripting capability in automating this process completely. A proactive development of a tool as a timely solution for our clients to support the massive ticket refund demand to be processed via BSP portal in bulk.

The way forward – nucore Refund Application Tool

What we offer here is the complete automation of issuance and monitoring of BSP Refund Applications saving 90% to 95% of manual effort. Taking all the data from either GDS or from TRAACS Back Office System eliminates the chances of any human errors because of the robotic data collection and submission process. Once the RA is created in BSPLink, our RA Bot will daily check the status and send you an update. That’s an extra benefit you get by using nucore’s RA tool. This solution is made available for TRAACS customers as well as other Travel Agents by May 25th 2020.