Past Present and Future - 40 years of ACTA

It was a time so far removed from the reality of the present day – no computers, no smartphones, no Internet – that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could actually have conducted a travel business without having access to the kinds of things that are commonplace in today’s world.

Consider for instance that, from the late 1960s to the mid- 1970s, the interests of Canadian travel agents were represented by the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA).

And, while ASTA did its job here – representing the industry on many different issues with various levels of government – the history of that time suggests that there was always a feeling among Canadian travel agents that they needed an association of their very own.

So step by step, between late 1975 and the summer of 1977, agents here began working towards that end, and the result was that in August of 1977, ACTA was established.

Over the years, the Association of Canadian Travel Agencies has tackled a broad range of issues in the interest of its members.

Everything from the introduction of the Bank Settlement Plan (BSP) here, to discounting, to airline commissions, to rules for computer reservation systems, to travel industry legislation

in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia, to the sometime tempestuous relationship between agents and suppliers, to airline commission caps and cuts, to geopolitical unrest, and much, much more.

Like any association, ACTA has had its ups and downs, but it has always been there for its members, giving them a voice on the issues that are important to them.

SO, WELCOME TO CANADIAN TRAVEL PRESS’ SPECIAL ACTA AT 40 ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT.

You’ll notice that we’ve taken a bit of a different approach, reaching out to the people who are part of the association and getting them to respond to a variety of questions and, in the process, tell their own story.

We’ve also included a special Voices of Travel podcast in the supplement that features Ron Pradinuk (himself an ACTA past president) interviewing ACTA Chair, Mary Jane Hiebert on her thoughts on the association.

All-in-all, it has been an interesting exercise and certainly an enlightening one, as it revealed a wide range of ideas that ultimately coalesced into a single theme – past, present and future – ACTA has always been, and will continue to be, the voice of the industry.