IATA Foundation (Aggregate Prep) cheat sheet

IATA divides the world into three Traffic Conference Areas: TC1 (Western Hemisphere), TC2 (Europe, Africa and the Middle East) and TC3 (Asia, Australia and the Pacific).

UNWTO definition: a visitor travels outside their usual environment for less than 12 months, for leisure, business or other purposes, and the trip is not remunerated from within the place visited.

Visitor = tourist (overnight) + excursionist (same-day, no overnight stay).

Retail travel agent sells on behalf of principals (airlines, hotels, car suppliers); a tour operator assembles components into a package and carries the commercial risk.

Distribution channels are direct (supplier website, call centre) or indirect (travel agency, OTA, corporate travel department, GDS).

The main GDS platforms are Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport; they hold airline, hotel and car inventory and push bookings into the supplier's system.

Vertical integration links different levels of the chain (airline owning a tour operator); horizontal integration links businesses at the same level (two agencies merging).

Ancillary revenue comes from optional extras such as checked baggage, seat selection, onboard catering, priority boarding and loyalty programmes, not from the base fare.

Longitude rule: 360° of longitude / 24 hours = 15° per one hour of time difference from UTC.

Elapsed flight time = (arrival local time − departure local time) − (arrival UTC offset − departure UTC offset). Use positive offsets east of UTC and negative offsets west.

International Date Line: crossing eastbound the date goes back one day (a day is repeated); crossing westbound the date moves forward one day (a day is skipped).

IATA location codes are three letters: a city code (e.g. LON, PAR, NYC) may cover several airports, each with its own three-letter airport code (e.g. LHR, CDG, JFK).

Airline designator codes are two characters (e.g. BA, LH); ICAO uses four-letter airport codes and three-letter airline codes.

Great-circle distance is the shortest path between two points on the globe; IATA fare mileage is built on Ticketed Point Mileage (TPM) between consecutive points.

IATA fare seasons (high/low) are defined separately for each Traffic Conference Area, so 'summer' for pricing is not one global date range.

Hemispheres matter for product knowledge: seasons are reversed between northern and southern hemispheres, and tropical destinations are described by wet/dry seasons rather than four seasons.

Narrow-body aircraft have a single aisle and typically 100–240 seats; wide-body aircraft have two aisles and typically 250–600 seats and serve long-haul and high-density routes.

Hub-and-spoke networks concentrate connecting traffic at a hub; point-to-point networks fly nonstop between secondary cities without a connecting bank.

Codeshare: the marketing carrier sells seats under its own flight number on a flight operated by another airline; the operating carrier's rules and aircraft apply.

The three global airline alliances are Star Alliance, oneworld and SkyTeam; alliance membership drives through-checking, lounge access and mileage accrual.

IATA aircraft type codes are three characters, e.g. 738 = Boeing 737-800, 320 = Airbus A320, 77W = Boeing 777-300ER.

The nine freedoms of the air: 1st overfly, 2nd technical stop, 3rd set down from home state, 4th take on to home state, 5th carry traffic between two foreign states.

ETOPS rules govern how far a twin-engine aircraft may fly from an adequate diversion airport, which shapes long overwater routing.

Load factor = RPK (revenue passenger kilometres) / ASK (available seat kilometres), expressed as a percentage; it is the standard measure of airline capacity sold.

Fare construction: local fare = NUC (Neutral Unit of Construction) × ROE (Rate of Exchange), then rounded to the currency's IATA rounding unit.

A fare basis code encodes booking class, season, day of week, advance purchase and validity, e.g. the pattern of letters and numbers attached to the fare.

Fare rule conditions to check before quoting: minimum stay, maximum stay, advance purchase, stopovers, transfers, changes, cancellation and refundability.

Journey types: one-way, round trip (return to origin), circle trip (more than two fare components, returning to origin) and open jaw (surface sector at origin, turnaround or destination).

PNR record locators are six alphanumeric characters; an e-ticket number is 13 digits - a 3-digit airline accounting code plus a 10-digit serial.

Segment status codes: HK confirmed, HL waitlisted, UC/UN unable to confirm, XX cancelled - always verify status before issuing.

Taxes, fees and carrier-imposed surcharges (often YQ/YR) sit outside the base fare and must be shown separately in the quotation.

Involuntary changes (schedule change, cancellation, denied boarding) usually allow rebooking or refund regardless of the fare's voluntary-change penalty.

SERVQUAL service dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles; reliability (doing it right first time) is consistently rated most important.

Consultative sales sequence: open questions to establish needs → confirm understanding → recommend matching options → handle objections → close → after-sales follow-up.

Upselling = selling a higher-value version of the chosen product; cross-selling = selling a different, complementary product.

Service recovery sequence: acknowledge the problem, apologise, take ownership, fix it within stated authority, then follow up to confirm resolution.

Price transparency rule: quote the total price including taxes, fees and mandatory charges, and state the currency and what is excluded.

Record the customer's stated preferences and constraints in the PNR/CRM remarks so that later changes and repeat bookings can be handled consistently.

Escalate to a supervisor when the request exceeds the agent's authority (fare waivers, compensation, refunds outside policy) rather than promising an outcome that cannot be delivered.

Passport rule of thumb: many destinations require validity of at least six months beyond the intended date of return plus blank pages; always check the specific destination.

Schengen short-stay rule: maximum 90 days within any 180-day period across the Schengen area; the count is rolling, not per calendar year.

IATA Timatic holds the current entry requirements (passport, visa, health) by nationality and destination, and is the reference used at check-in.

APIS/advance passenger data: carriers must transmit passport and itinerary data to border authorities before departure on many routes.

ICAO Annex 17 covers aviation security (screening, access control); Annex 9 covers facilitation (border formalities, passenger data).

Montreal Convention 1999 governs airline liability for death or injury, delay and baggage on international carriage; limits are set in SDR and reviewed every five years.

Liquid restrictions in many states: containers of 100 ml or less, carried in one transparent resealable bag of about 1 litre per passenger.

Denied boarding and long delays trigger defined care and compensation obligations under local passenger-rights rules (e.g. EU Regulation 261/2004), separate from the Montreal Convention.

BSP (Billing and Settlement Plan): IATA consolidates all agent sales in a country, the agent files one sales report per period and remits a single net amount to the plan.

ADM (Agent Debit Memo) is an amount charged back to the agency, e.g. for a ticketing error or hidden-tax discrepancy; an ACM (Agent Credit Memo) is the reverse.

Gross (selling) fare = net fare + commission or markup; the agency's income is the difference plus any supplier incentives.

Card handling: PCI DSS requires protecting stored card data, never storing the CVV, and using tokenised or masked numbers on receipts.

Document lifecycle: issue → void (same day, before settlement) → reissue/exchange (fare difference plus change fee) → refund (unused coupons and unused taxes).

Reconciliation matches the BSP sales report, ticket coupons/electronic usage, the bank deposit and the customer invoice for each settlement period.

Foreign-currency transactions convert at the applicable ROE or BSP rate on the settlement date, and exchange-rate differences are posted as a separate gain or loss line.