In addition to the direct benefits of membership in IAADFS, members benefit from the association’s advocacy activities and other programs conducted on behalf of the members and the industry as a whole. Some examples of IAADFS efforts in these areas include:

• In the mid-1990’s, IAADFS organized and financed a duty free awareness campaign which sought to educate international travelers about the benefits of duty free shopping. This campaign featured advertising in a variety of English and Spanish language publications as well as in airports.
  
• IAADFS funded an in-depth study completed in 1997 by Coopers & Lybrand to summarize the regulations that govern duty free operations in South American countries and to explain the breadth and importance of this market with respect to the impact on the local economies of these countries.
  
• IAADFS has organized education programs and webinars on various topics of interest to both the buyer and supplier communities in the duty free industry for the benefit of association members and other industry representatives.
  
• IAADFS was instrumental in lobbying for a doubling of the duty free allowance from $400 to $800 for the value of duty free merchandise that a returning U.S. resident is entitled to bring back into the United States.
  
• IAADFS also successfully lobbied for an increase in the duty free allowance from $600 to $800 for U.S. travelers returning from a Caribbean country or from an Andean country (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru). The duty free allowance for travelers returning from American Samoa, Guam or the Virgin Islands was increased from $1200 to $1600. In addition, this $1600 allowance permits returning travelers to include goods valued up to $800 from other countries in their overall total.
  
• A five-year campaign by IAADFS to modernize some of the procedures that US-based duty free stores must follow resulted in beneficial changes to US Customs rules, simplifying procedures for these stores.
  
• Partnering with other industry organizations, IAADFS has conducted extensive worldwide lobbying campaigns to protect the rights of duty free stores to sell certain popular types of duty free products in their stores. Proposed restrictions would have had wide-scale negative effects on the duty free industry, and IAADFS’ coordination of these lobbying campaigns culminated in positive results for the industry.
  
• Most recently, IAADFS has been cooperating with other organizations to ameliorate the effects of the liquids and gels ban on the duty free industry. The association has been very active with other organizations trying to mitigate the loss of business from this ban, and to resolve the problem of how transient passengers are handled as they make their interim stops.