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The airlines industry spent $31 million lobbying Congress last year. The hotel industry plunked down $8 million and the cruise industry dropped more than $6 million on lobbying. How much did travelers spend to get their voices heard in Washington? Nothing.

That’s about to change. And we need your help and money to keep working for you. So far, the efforts have been funded out of pocket because we feel this is important work that needs to be done to protect you from unseen problems while traveling.

This work is not always glamorous. The issues are not always dramatic. But the matters that come into focus for the Consumer Travel Alliance affect every traveler, business or leisure, whenever they face TSA inspections, withdraw money from a foreign cash machine or use their credit card overseas, buy an airline ticket through a travel agent (online or traditional) or face ever-escalating fees for everything from flights to rental cars.

The Consumer Travel Alliance has been working quietly trying to tilt the balance in favor of you. We’ve been in Washington, D.C., for about six months working to learn the system, meet Senators and Representatives, interview regulators and officials at federal agencies, and meet other associations representing travel agents, online travel agents, business travelers and airline passenger rights advocates.

Already, we have taken positions, attended hearings and written letters and articles supporting pro-consumer travel issues in our Nation’s Capital.

• Tarmac Delay legislation — we have worked to support the efforts to set time limits on how long passengers can be held on board aircraft while waiting to take off.

• Passenger privacy rights — we led a phone and email campaign to support House of Representative efforts to keep full-body scanning machines, that can see right through your clothes, from being uses as the primary screening method at airports.

• Identity protection — we are the only travel oriented group who has alerted the travel industry about the dangers of having the newly required TSA information being used for the Secure Traveler program stored in unsecured computers. This is a recipe for identity theft since the date of birth, now required information, is one of the most important pieces for anyone trying to steal identity or crack into secure banking information.

• Foreign transaction fees — Consumer Travel Alliance wrote strong letters to Rep. Barney Frank and called the responsible Senate committee to alert them to the fact that while foreign currency exchange fees were covered in the recently-passed credit card bill, foreign transaction fees were not. Since that time, foreign transaction fees have been expanded and increased by almost every credit card issuer.

• Airline alliances and antitrust immunity — Consumer Travel Alliance has been the sole consumer organization that has repeatedly warned about the anticompetitive nature of today’s international alliances. Today with both the SkyTeam (anchored by Air France/KLM and Delta) and Star Alliance (headed by Lufthansa, United and soon Continental) operating like a single unified airline for international flights, competition has been reduced dramatically.

• Consumer protections — we have been intimately involved in fighting efforts by United Airlines to change the relationship with passengers through a shift on processing of credit card payments. United’s proposed changes mean passengers will lose protections afforded those who purchase airline tickets using credit cards. These new proposals also strike at the heart of the Contract of Carriage and they will make travel far more of a hassle should anyone subjected to United Airlines’ new rules need to change routing or ticketing during their travels.

We need your money and your support to push a consumer-friendly travel agenda in Washington. Please donate right now.

A charter membership of $25 will allow us to keep fighting for you in Washington. We are also working to develop alliance benefits that will help out with any future travel. As they come on line, all members will immediately benefit.

We will be asking your for input on how we can best launch our membership drive and what kinds of cutting-edge products you feel would most useful, that can be added to our membership package.

And we’re looking for a group of charter members willing to join now to help our start-up efforts in Washington. Please join our exclusive focus group, where we can swap ideas for how to make the travel industry a better place.

Join the Consumer Travel Alliance Charter Focus Group

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