On April 3, the Small Business Administration (SBA) launched the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was one of the central relief programs included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. According to the American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA), for every member that it has heard from “who has successfully obtained relief, there are at least 10 who have not. And that number will not get any better as the SBA it’s “unable to accept new applications for the Paycheck Protection Program based on available appropriations funding,” according to CNBC.
ASTA is asking that advisors and others in the travel industry “take two minutes out of your day to contact your members of Congress through our grassroots portal and ask them to fix the PPP.” It adds that phone calls are most effective but call volumes are high right now. If you can’t get through to your representative, you can find your legislators' district (in-state) offices here: House of Representatives; Senate.
“While you work on longer-term fixes to the PPP, [we] urge you to press the SBA to expand the network of PPP lenders as broadly as possible; encourage approved lenders to accept applications from all borrowers and not just those borrowers that have a pre-existing financial relationship with the lender; increase funding for the program to $750 billion; and add another $50 billion to the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program (another small business program that has run out of funding),” ASTA said in a statement provided to Travel Agent.
The last grassroots effort on “Round 3” of funding helped ASTA send over 28,000 responses to Congress from the travel advisor community. "These efforts make a difference," it adds.
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