Do you need IATA to sell flights online?
If you want to start a travel agency or an online booking site, someone will tell you to get IATA first. It sounds like a rule. It is not.
I have worked on flight platforms where we had no ticketing authority at all. The products still sold flights every day. Here is how that works, and where it gets hard.
The short answer
No. You do not need IATA to sell flights online.
What you need is someone who can issue the ticket. That someone is a consolidator. They already have the authority, and they use it for you.
Who actually issues the ticket
In the products I worked on, the tickets were not issued by us. They were issued by the consolidator, on their own office ID.
So the flow looks like this:
- Your customer searches and books on your site.
- Your platform creates the booking and passes the PNR to the consolidator.
- The consolidator issues the ticket. Usually this takes about 10 minutes.
- Your platform checks the consolidator’s order details until it sees the ticket is issued.
- Once it is issued, your platform tells the customer automatically.
The customer sees your brand the whole time. The consolidator is the part they never see.
If you want the technical side of that checking step, I wrote about it in Why consolidators should send webhooks, not make us poll.
Where it gets hard
Here’s the thing. The happy path is easy to explain. The slow tickets are where the work is.
Sometimes issuance takes longer than 10 minutes. The longest I have seen was 30 minutes. In that time your customer is waiting, and you have to handle them. Often you also have to chase the consolidator and ask why the ticket is not out yet.
It gets harder when you work with several consolidators. Each one behaves a little differently. With four of them, it gets tough. You need clear messages to the customer and a good way to see which bookings are still waiting.
This is the part many new agencies do not plan for. They think about search and payment. They forget about the wait between “booked” and “ticketed”.
What to do before you pick a consolidator
You can test a lot before you sign anything. Ask yourself:
- Do they have an API that lets you pass the booking and check its status? Doing this by hand will not scale.
- How fast do they usually issue? Ask them, and then watch it yourself.
- What happens when a ticket is slow? Who do you contact?
- Can you work with more than one, so you are not stuck with a single source of fares?
If you do not want to deal with consolidators first, there is another easy starting point. Duffel offers an API to search and book flights. I have not built on it myself, but I know how to use it and I recommend it as a fast way to begin. You can read both options in Two ways to start selling flights without IATA.
Where the money should go
Starting without IATA saves you money. Don’t spend it all on tech.
My view is that the most common mistake founders make is thinking this is an expensive business to start. The real costs are some API costs, and then marketing. Put the bigger part into marketing. A booking site that nobody visits sells nothing, with or without IATA.
Once you have a range of fares, from low cost to full service, start telling people you exist.
When IATA starts to make sense
Later, yes, you may want IATA. With direct ticketing authority you can get better fares from airlines, and that means more margin on every ticket.
My rough rule of thumb is to think about it once you are near 400 to 500 tickets a month. That is my own estimate. I am not fully sure of it, and your routes and margins may say something different. I explain more in When should a travel agency get IATA?
What to do next
Here is how I would start:
- Decide how you will get tickets issued: a consolidator or an API like Duffel.
- Build the full flow, including the wait for issuance and the message to the customer.
- Add low cost carriers so your customers can pick from more fares.
- Spend on marketing and get your first bookings.
- Look at IATA when your volume says it is time.
You do not need permission to start. You need a booking flow that works, including on the slow days.
If you want help connecting a booking site to consolidators and automating the ticketing step, take a look at our consolidator API and automated ticketing service.