IATA Resolution 850m

Industry policy — not law International

A binding rule made and enforced by a private trade association through membership and licensing, not by a legislature or regulator.

An Agency Debit Memo is how an airline enforces its distribution policy against an agency. Not a lawsuit, not a regulatory complaint — a debit raised through BSP or ARC, the settlement system the agency must use to get paid. Resolution 850m sets the rules for raising, disputing and settling them.

• Enforcement inside the payment rail - the agency’s exposure runs through the same machinery that remits its ticket sales.
• Airline-initiated - the carrier raises the memo; the agency disputes within a defined window.
• Scope is distribution policy - fare rule breaches, prohibited booking practices, churning, passive segments, unauthorised redistribution.

Why a travel API report cares

Because ADMs are where the published technical surface and the enforceable commercial rule meet, and the second is invisible in the first.

The State of Australian Travel APIs records Air Transat’s CRS policy barring the sharing or redistribution of its content to any third-party agent, GDS or metasearch without prior written consent, requiring booking and ticketing within the same CRS, prohibiting passive segments and inventory holding — and enforcing all of it through ADMs under Resolution 850m.

None of that appears in a specification. An engineer reading Transat’s downloadable contract sees a Radixx SOAP API. The rule that determines what may lawfully be done with the response sits in a distribution policy enforced through a settlement debit.

The same pattern runs through the quartet’s other terms: WestJet requires Canadian OTAs to hold a direct sales incentive contract or book through an Official Redistributor, on pain of suspension, and raises ADMs “without limitation of minimum value”. Qantas revokes ticketing authority at sole discretion after six months of inactivity.

The transferable lesson

For anyone assessing an API in an intermediated industry: read the enforcement mechanism before the specification. A well-documented endpoint governed by a discretionary debit regime is a different commercial proposition from an identical endpoint governed by a contract with defined remedies — and the Kin Score, which reads published artifacts, cannot tell them apart.

That gap is precisely what the Switchability lens on the Kin Score roadmap exists to record, alongside Resolution 824 accreditation and the access-model evidence the travel quartet collected.