Key Travel Industry Organizations

IATA - The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is an international industry trade group of airlines headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the International Civil Aviation Organization is also headquartered. The executive offices are at the Geneva Airport in Switzerland.
IATA's mission is to represent, lead, and serve the airline industry. IATA represents some 240 airlines comprising 84% of scheduled international air traffic. The Director General and Chief Executive Officer is Tony Tyler. Currently, IATA is present in over 150 countries covered through 101 offices around the globe.

OAG - formerly Official Airline Guide, is a United Kingdom based business providing aviation information and analytical services sourced from its proprietary airline schedules, flight status, fleet, MRO and cargo logistics databases. OAG is best known for its airline schedules database which holds future and historical flight details for more than 1,000 airlines and over 4,000 airports. This aggregated data feeds the world’s global distribution systems and travel portals, and drives the internal systems of many airlines, air traffic control systems, aircraft manufacturers, airport planners and government agencies around the world. The organization operates globally and has offices in Europe (UK and Netherlands), Asia (Singapore, China and Japan) and the Americas (United States and Canada). OAG is organized into three customer-facing channels: OAG Aviation, OAG Cargo and OAG Travel.

ATPCO - The Airline Tariff Publishing Company,  is a corporation that publishes the latest airfares for more than 500 airlines multiple times per day. Based at Washington Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., ATPCO also has offices in Miami, Florida; London, UK; and Singapore. ATPCO is owned by a number of US and international airlines.
ATPCO provides fare data in an electronic format with the encoded rules associated with those fares, which make the information suitable for computer processing. The only competitor to ATPCO is SITA, who distributes some fares in Asia, Africa and Europe.
The users of the data are Global Distribution Systems (GDS), such as Sabre, Amadeus, Travel port, and their associated travel agents; the Computer Reservation Systems (CRS) of airlines; online travel agencies such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity; and other service providers in the travel industry. Because the data is formatted for computer processing, the latest fares can be loaded automatically, allowing these new fares to be sold in the market place in the shortest possible time.
Fares are distributed hourly each day (except for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday) for international markets, and four times a weekday and once Saturday and Sunday in US/CA markets. Airlines carefully monitor new public fares filed by their competition for publication through ATPCO. Once the fares have been distributed by ATPCO, airlines detect the action of other airlines increasing or decreasing their fares for specific connections, and then use this information to set their own pricing strategy. For instance, if they see a competitor introducing special promotional pricing between two cities, they may want to quickly react by filing their own special fares through ATPCO for that market