I refer to the article that appeared in your recent issue (Travel Weekly January 31) in relation to Choice Air’s approach to the Office of Fair Trading.
There is a simple answer as to why we do not believe that there is a need to list Choice Air’s prices on Orbit and it is not fear of competition.
Avro does not fear competition from anyone and there are competitors that pose a far greater challenge, such as Unijet, JMC, Airtours, Thomson, Club Travel 2000 and Cosmos, whose prices we are happy to show alongside ours in the interest of maintaining Orbit’s credibility with the agents who use it.
All these operators have the spread, depth of capacity and product integrity that warrant a presence on Orbit.
Freedom Flights will be added once they have operated long enough for us to be satisfied of their product integrity.
However, we cannot list all operators in the market and an operator with a capacity of only 2,578 seats, such as Choice Air, does not need to be listed on Orbit to fill that capacity.
Fabio A Mantegazza
Chairman
Avro
London