Travel management agents and airline, hotel agents

When a flight is cancelled, a travel management company (TMC) has to rebook the traveller within the employer’s policy, move the hotel night, and recover the value of the unused ticket, often for hundreds of travellers at once. Today much of that runs through queues, agency desks and phone calls. An agent-to-agent version lets the TMC’s agent receive the airline’s disruption notice, request compliant rebooking offers, accept one, claim the refund the rules require, and tell the hotel’s agent about the late arrival, with a person stepping in for travellers who need one.

How it works today

Booking channels. TMCs book air through global distribution systems and through airlines’ direct connections built on IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC). IATA describes NDC as an XML-based data exchange standard for offer and order management, supported by an IATA resolution in 2012; the current generation is NDC 24.1. Its companion, ONE Order, is an XML standard that combines the passenger name record (PNR), e-ticket and electronic miscellaneous document into a single customer order, as part of IATA’s Modern Airline Retailing work. Hotels and car rental firms exchange reservations using message specifications such as those from the OpenTravel Alliance, which publishes air, hotel, car and channel specifications in XML and JSON.

Disruption. When the airline changes or cancels a flight, the booking lands in an agency queue or the traveller’s inbox. A TMC consultant checks the travel policy, looks for alternatives, and calls the airline’s agency desk when the options on screen do not work. Hotel changes go by phone or email. Refunds for unused tickets are claimed later.

Refund rules. Both countries set passenger rights:

	United States	Canada
Rule	14 CFR Part 260 (US DOT, April 2024)	Air Passenger Protection Regulations, SOR/2019-150 (CTA)
Trigger	Cancellation, or a significant change such as a departure three or more hours earlier or an arrival three or more hours later on domestic itineraries (six hours international)	Delay or cancellation, with obligations depending on whether the cause was within the carrier’s control, within its control but required for safety, or outside its control
Rebooking	Passenger may choose a refund instead of accepting the change	Within control: large carriers must rebook on the next available flight within nine hours, or within 48 hours if that is impossible. Outside control: a confirmed reservation within 48 hours of the original departure, otherwise a refund or alternate arrangements
Refund timing	Seven business days for credit card purchases, 20 calendar days for other forms of payment	Within 30 days of the carrier becoming obligated

Which row applies, and whether the cause was within the carrier’s control, decides what the traveller is owed. Today a consultant works that out case by case.

The agent-to-agent version

Illustrative. An airline’s agent has a push notification config registered by the TMC’s agent. When a Toronto to Chicago flight is cancelled, it sends a task update, and the TMC’s agent asks for rebooking offers:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 7,
  "method": "SendMessage",
  "params": {
    "message": {
      "messageId": "msg-disrupt-3321-1",
      "role": "ROLE_USER",
      "parts": [
        { "text": "Order ORD-8841 was cancelled. Please offer alternatives that arrive in Chicago before 09:00 tomorrow, economy cabin, same fare family." },
        {
          "data": {
            "orderId": "ORD-8841",
            "travellers": 1,
            "arriveBy": "2026-10-15T09:00:00-05:00",
            "cabin": "economy",
            "corporateProgram": "EXAMPLE-CORP-01",
            "alsoConsider": "refund"
          },
          "mediaType": "application/json"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Then:

1. The airline agent returns two offers as artifacts and states its disruption classification, which determines the traveller’s rights under the APPR.
2. The TMC agent checks both against the employer’s policy and the traveller’s profile, and accepts the one that arrives at 07:40.
3. The airline agent reissues the order and confirms it.
4. The TMC agent tells the hotel’s agent that the guest will arrive a day late and asks it to keep the reservation for the second night, within the hotel’s own change rules.
5. For a traveller who is stranded overnight with a medical need, the TMC agent routes the case to a consultant instead of choosing for them.

NDC and ONE Order remain the content standards for offers and orders. The agent exchange is the conversation around them: the question, the constraints, the answer and the reasons.

What has to be true

Identity. The airline must know the TMC agent acts for the agency that holds this booking and for this corporate client. The TMC agent must know it is talking to the operating airline or its authorized system, since disruption notices are an easy target for phishing that redirects travellers to fake rebooking pages.

Authority. The employer’s travel policy is the limit: cabin, fare cap, preferred carriers, approval rules for exceptions. The traveller’s consent matters for changes that alter their trip materially. Payment adds its own constraint: card data passed between agents falls under the PCI Data Security Standard, the baseline for protecting payment account data, so agents should pass tokens or virtual card references, never raw card numbers.

Record. Refund rights depend on facts recorded at the time: when the change happened, what the airline offered, whether the traveller accepted, and how the airline classified the cause. The TMC needs that record for refund claims, for the employer’s duty-of-care reporting, and for complaints to the US DOT or the Canadian Transportation Agency.

Standards involved: IATA NDC and ONE Order, OpenTravel specifications, 14 CFR Part 260, the APPR, PCI DSS, and A2A push notifications and tasks for the exchange.

Where Emissar fits

• Verify (in development) checks that a disruption notice comes from the airline’s real agent and that a rebooking request comes from the agency of record.
• Mandate (spec in progress) is a proposal for encoding the employer’s policy limits so the airline or hotel can check them.
• Ledger (spec in progress) keeps a signed record of offers, choices and classifications for refund claims and complaints.
• Settle (planned) could handle refunds on AP2 or x402 rails, checked against Mandate limits.
• Handoff (in development) passes travellers who need judgment or care to a consultant with the full exchange attached.

Open questions

• Will airlines expose disruption offers to TMC agents through A2A, or only through NDC APIs the TMC calls itself?
• Who resolves a disagreement over whether a cause was within the carrier’s control, and on what record?
• How do the traveller’s own assistant agent and the employer’s TMC agent avoid acting on the same booking at once?
• Which hotel changes can an agent make without a person at the property?
• How should duty-of-care obligations shape which cases an agent may handle alone?