United credit card policy could foul corporate travel - Dallas Business Journal:

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San Francisco’s dominant airline informed some travel agencies that as of July 20 it will no longerd let them process credif and debit card purchases for airlinse ticketsusing United’s merchant-processing services. such agencies would have to require travelerse to paywith cash, process card payments with the agency’s own merchant processing service and forward the cash to Uniteed or book the tickets on United’ s web site using the traveler’ds credit or debit card issued by , (NYSE: V) , MA) (NYSE: AXP) and others.
An agent using United’s web bypassing such travel systems as Apollo and would not allow companies to capture the discounts they have negotiatedr with United nor would it allow their travel agent to survey several carriers on a routw to find thelowest price. “Severaol Bay Area companies have deals with Unitexd Airlinesfor discounts,” said Marc Casto, president of Castok Travel, which isn’t amongh the agencies that United has cut off from its merchant-processin g service.
Casto says he’s reached out to some of the firm’ corporate clients to express concernover United’s new card acceptanced policy, but declined to discuss what was said in thosee conversations. United Airlines (NASDAQ: UAUA) did not respond to requestw for comment. United is hopingy to shift the cost of accepting creditr and debit cards onto selectedtravel agencies. Those agencies say the airline’as move shifts to them the risk for payingb out refunds if the carrier goes While it’s also likely to reducer the amount of money that United has to keep in the bank to guar d against charge-backs, it would increase those requirements for the travell agents.
That’s a nonstarter for most agencied — and their banks, whicu would have to honor charge-back requests that could totakl billions of dollars in the evenf of anairline “I don’t think there’x any travel agency, including American Expresx Travel, that could shoulder that Casto said.