The report of the enquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster makes shocking reading but contains important lessons for the travel industry, says Andy Cooper
When the EU introduced the Package Travel Directive in 1990 it created for the first time an obligation on the part of those selling package holidays (who were almost entirely tour operators in those days) to accept responsibility for the actions or failings of their suppliers.
The law took a while to become implemented and established across EU member states, but it rapidly led to changes in how the industry worked.
In the UK, although not across the whole of Europe, lawyers in the travel industry and those representing customers came to a view that the Directive created an obligation to ensure that the sellers of package holidays took steps to ensure their customers were safe during their journey and stay.
Prior to that legislation, the UK courts had taken a rather different position and said, in effect, that if a tour operator had chosen their suppliers carefully, in the words of a High Court judge: “I would find it wholly unreasonable to saddle a tour operator with an obligation to ensure the safety of all the components of a package over none of which he had any control at all.”
The change in the legal position resulted in the large travel companies gradually developing systems and processes to address customer safety, and – once the operators had recognised this was a non-competitive matter – to the gradual development of the Federation of Tour Operators (FTO) Codes of Practice on Health and Safety. The FTO is now part of Abta.
No-one wants their customers injured or killed while on holiday. But for tour operators, beyond simple humanity, the reasons for this focus are easy to explain:
- Any death or injury, however caused, can have negative reputational impacts on the selling company.
- Any resulting claims are likely to involve cost and work in dealing with them.
- Getting it badly wrong could potentially result in the Company, its directors or relevant staff being the subject of criminal prosecutions.
As a result, tour operators spend considerable amounts of time trying to persuade hoteliers to implement new safety measures in their properties. This wasn’t always easy, as the UK was an outlier in interpreting the requirements of the Directive in this way.
The main argument was that the standards were little different to those in the UK, and that British customers expected to see those standards when they travelled.
Those arguments seemed to be accepted over a number of years, and there have been some significant changes in hotels and apartments in mainstream tourist destinations.
Fire safety has always been a particular area of concern and, while hotel fires are relatively unusual, prevention has always been a huge focus of tour operators’ work in this area due to the speed at which a fire can spread.
For this reason, the recent findings of the enquiry into the fire at the Grenfell Tower block of flats in West Kensington, London, in 2017 came as a shock.
The report, which has been published in two parts, runs to more than 2,500 pages, so I suspect most people will like me only read the Executive Summaries. In themselves, these are damaging enough.
They demonstrate that a combination of dishonest product suppliers, poor construction and refurbishment, poor management and incompetent individuals in key roles can result in something as commonplace as a small electrical fire spreading and destroying a large tower block, causing significant loss of life.
If this had happened in a hotel in a tourist destination, the tour operators would probably have been castigated for their part, however small.
But – and it’s a big but – I would like to think that if a tour operator saw a situation with a property similar to Grenfell, they would not contract that property.
Frighteningly, seven years on from the fire, there are apparently more than 1,750 social housing blocks with similar structural problems to Grenfell in the UK which have not yet been rectified, and no remedial work has been undertaken at all on more than 1,200 of those.
We could not accept this as travel businesses, and it is concerning that people are expected to live in these buildings.
The Grenfell Tower disaster and its aftermath demonstrate the need to remain vigilant on safety issues and to ensure your business both understands the major risks and has the means to address any issues which may arise.
Andy Cooper is founder and principal of Owens Cooper Consulting and has held a series of senior industry roles, including head of legal services at MyTravel, director of government and external affairs at Thomas Cook, and general secretary of the Federation of Tour Operators.