I didn’t go to ABTA. It was just too far and we are too busy producing brochures. I understand, however, that there was a session on the demands about to be made upon us by an insurance body called the General Insurance Standards Council.
Apparently, the insurance industry is worried about the travel industry’s ability to sell insurance correctly and also about the fact that operators take in insurance premiums and either do not send them in on time to the underwriters or just do not send them in at all.
So, we have yet another body poking their nose into our industry and wanting guarantees of performance.
I understand this lot want tour operators to put the net amount of the insurance premium into a trust account so we can’t get our hands on the cash if we are a few pennies short.
Therefore, anyone taking the operator’s insurance will, I assume, have to send in two cheques. One made out to the trust account for the net part of the insurance premium and the other cheque for the tour operator’s margin element of the insurance premium and the holiday deposit.
Well, that’s easy to do isn’t it? I’m sure we’ll all love messing around with this one. In the end, if we don’t stand up to the GISC we shall be asked to bond insurance premium receipts separately! Join the queue all you suppliers, we tour operators can bond everything.
We’ve already got the CAA, ABTA, IATA, AITO Trust, credit-card merchant services and the odd airline, so why not the milkman, the office cleaners and everyone else?
And how thorough will this training be? Will they train the Post Office and every other body that’s jumped on to the travel insurance selling bandwagon as well? Will they train every single travel agency consultant in the difference between their own policy and that of every tour operator they sell?
Will they be told to look through and compare cover details so that they can give the clients a fair deal? Will they be expected to advise that Sunvil’s delay cover kicks in after 6hrs instead of 12 and that it covers double-touch flights so that, if the aircraft breaks down half way, those that are going on to the second destination are deemed not to have begun their journey? Will they know to check that their own long-haul policy covers holiday disruption caused by hurricanes?
Will it be worth an agency’s time to spend longer advising on insurance than on selling a holiday? So, at the end of all this training what would have been achieved and how useful will it be? Will we have to take out special insurance cover to protect us should wrong advice have been given?
And really, why should those of us who pay our premiums to underwriters and brokers more or less on time have to suffer because there are others who don’t? Why do insurance companies and brokers continue to deal with operators who are unreliable, falsify returns or just do not pay? If the insurance industry is unable to exercise a little common sense in their commercial dealings with tour operators then it’s their fault. I hope that bodies such as ABTA and AITO will fight these proposals and make sure bodies such as the GISC realise we are just not a ‘soft touch.’