The Association of Retail Travel Agents (ARTA) has written to Travelport President and Director, Americas Region and Airline IT Solutions, Derek Sharp, requesting a one-month postponement of the implementation of the new ¡®Travelport Agility¡¯ suite, due to be launched on January 1, 2012.

Citing ¡°grave concerns¡± for its Apollo, Worldspan and Gallileo GDS users, who are set to be affected by the new bundle, ARTA says the requested extra time is crucial to negotiating ¡°constructive dialogue¡± on the Agility suite and its potential impact on subscribers, who were only informed of the plan on December 6.

In a letter to its agency users, Travelport said that it had extracted key GDS functionality including queues, profiles, back-office interface records, and bridging (used by after-hours services), among other things, into a suite of pay-to-use services.

In a nutshell, the new bundle will combine existing stand-alone solutions and services, some of which are currently free-of-charge and essential to agency operations, with new solutions. The monthly cost to users will be approximately US$35 per workstation (device address). ?

¡°For example, a medium size U.S. travel agency with 10 Travelport device addresses, both booking and administrative, would incur a new fee of $4200 per year,¡± ARTA said.

As well as the financial burden the new plan will place on its members, ARTA is concerned the move by Travelport may signal the first major fundamental shift in a mandatory agent-pay model.