A Practical Guide to BSP Reconciliation for Travel Agencies

If your agency issues tickets through IATA's Billing and Settlement Plan, you already know the monthly ritual: download the MIR file from your GDS, and somehow turn it into a clear picture of what was billed, what was collected in commission, and what still needs chasing. Here's how to make that process predictable.

What's actually inside a MIR file

A MIR (Multilateral Interline Reporting) file is a fixed-width or delimited text export listing every transaction reported to the BSP for a given period: ticket issuances, refunds, voids and exchanges, each carrying a PNR, ticket number, fare amount, tax breakdown and commission. Reading it by eye is possible for ten transactions a month; it stops being realistic well before a hundred.

Match by ticket number, not by PNR alone

A single PNR can carry several passengers, each with their own ticket and their own MIR line. Reconciling at the PNR level silently merges or drops individual passengers — always match at ticket-number granularity, then roll up to the booking for reporting.

Flag exceptions immediately, not at month-end

The most useful moment to catch a mismatch — a ticket voided in the GDS but still marked as issued in your invoicing, or a commission that doesn't match your agreed rate — is the day the MIR lands, not three weeks later when the billing cycle closes and options for fixing it have narrowed.

Automate the parsing, keep a human in the loop for exceptions

Automated MIR parsing should handle the 95% of lines that match cleanly and surface only the handful that don't — a voided ticket, an unexpected fare adjustment, a commission mismatch — for a human to review. That's the difference between reconciliation taking four hours and taking fifteen minutes.