[timrogers]

The claim in the quote here is simply not true.

The travel agency is the one that collects your personal information - but it (unsurprisingly) immediately passes just about everything to the airline: name, date of birthday, phone number, email etc.

In general, the airline won’t get your payment details though.

[slightwinder]

> The claim in the quote here is simply not true.

How? There are two setups, either you book with an agency, which then forwards your data to the airline, or you book directly with an airline. In both cases, you have a more or less fixed amount of data collected, due to legal requirements. But the agency will usually act as a proxy, only forwarding the absolute necessary information, and using some on their own (like form of payment or contacts), often even send replacement-data or their own to the airline.

So it's absolutely true that in certain common setups, the airline is not the one collecting and holding most information. But, this comes with the price that more parties are holding your information.

And agencies are often going through a CRS or even through a middleman to the CRS, not booking directly with the airline, so there is a good chance of a third or even fourth party also holding your information. Though, technically this can also depend on the agency, airline and type of flight. With Charter- and Lowcost-flights it can happen that the agency is going directly to the airline, hacking their way around the airlines' website. But this is getting shoot down in the last years but those airline, and not obvious from the outside.

Oh, and historically speaking, it used to be that agencies were often collecting more personal information than laws demanded, while airlines went with the absolute necessary stuff. So maybe the article was meaning this aspect too.