The travel industry should be “ashamed” that it has failed to sort out the mess that is the financial protection regime, Travel Convention delegates were told.
Speaking in the Loose Talk session on the final day of the convention in Malta, Paul Evans, chief executive of the Lowcost Travel Group, said until airlines are brought into the protection fold nothing will be solved.
He said in five years the industry had actually “gone backwards” on this issue, and believed the only solution is to make airlines see ‘selling’ protection as a potential revenue stream.
“Unless we get airlines to pay some money towards a protection service we are all of us wasting our time.
“We are going round and round talking about this issue which, five years later we have made absolutely no progress on. We should be ashamed of ourselves that in five years we have actually gone backwards.”
Evans urged airlines to see the offering of protection as a potential profit stream, like charging for hold baggage is now. “We have got to give the airlines a commercial rational for paying it,” he said.
However Oliver Brendan, ATD Travel Services founder, said: “I cannot see that it’s morally right for airlines to make money out of consumer protection.
“At the end of the day it’s not an issue, 98% of our consumers are protected credit cards on which we do not pay a fee.”
But Evans replied: “You are kidding yourself if you are just going to rely on the credit cards, you need a regulatory framework because the banks will just charge you too much.”
In an earlier session BA director of sales and marketing said it was not BA’s job to subsidise weaker airlines or to do the “heavy lifting” for the industry.