ABTA is dropping the association’s name from the title of its annual conference and will focus heavily on travel agent managers and owners.
Instead of the ABTA Travel Convention, the event’s name will be changed to the Travel Convention for this year’s conference in Tenerife.
All business sessions will now have a travel industry focus, with BBC Radio 2 broadcaster Jeremy Vine as compere. ABTA chief executive Mark Tanzer admitted the convention had lacked focus in the past.
He said: “We still want to keep the doors open to any travel business and hope other industry bodies will also come on board. Agents will be key delegates at the convention. But we believe those who get most out of it are the managers and owners of businesses, and we will focus on them.
“The name change is just part of the positioning. We want the convention to be there for the whole of the industry and have themes relevant to other organisations. It’s not an ABTA convention, it’s a travel convention.”
Tanzer admitted the move was in part to make ABTA more attractive to non-traditional players, such as online companies, to join.
“We are talking to a number of others and I think we will see other companies want to be part of ABTA. It’s not the case of trying to open the doors of ABTA to everyone, we will always judge on quality.
“We could have 1,000 members today if we didn’t care about their financial situation. We always want to maintain the quality of the brand but we don’t want artifical barriers to joining.”
Other changes to this year’s convention include ensuring the Talk Zone does not clash with any other sessions, cocktail parties in each of the convention hotels, and more time for informal networking by starting sessions at 10am and finishing at 4.30pm.
The Convention website has been revamped and will provide a year-round forum for debate, so that questions can be aired before the convention.