ABTA is to pull
back from immediate legal action against British Airways to see if it still has
a legitimate case against the flag carrier.
Reacting with a
mixture of relief and disappointment to the results of BA’s Future Size and
Shape review, ABTA aviation board director Sandy MacPherson stressed he was not
“backtracking”, but would now seek legal counsel to see if ABTA could complain
to the Office of Fair Trading.
He said: “It’s not
all bad and it’s not all good. The trade needs to understand there was a very
real prospect of BA cutting out agent commission altogether, or reducing
payments to £2.50 across the board. There is no cap at £5 as we feared. This
has made us stop and think ‘do we now have a case?’”
ABTA chief
executive Ian Reynolds added: “The BA announcement is complex, but we’re not
ruling out going to the OFT.”
The biggest damage
will be to agents who sell a majority of domestic BA tickets, whose payments
have been slashed from £6 to £2.50 per sector.
“There’s no way an
agent can survive on £2.50 sector payments,” said MacPherson.
Reynolds said:
“It’s now quite clear there is no potential for profit with the new scheme.
No-one’s even pretending that £2.50 or £5 is a viable payment for face-to-face
service.”
MacPherson urged
BA to continue talking to the trade or be prepared for switch-selling.
“About 80% of BA’s
sales are from the trade. If agents are forced to add a booking fee on top of
BA’s fares then it would only take a small percentage of customers to stop and
ask ‘is there an alternative carrier?’
“We have to have an ongoing relationship with the carrier – something it
is testing pretty severely at the moment.”