The government may look at supporting the outbound travel industry once children are back to school this week, but it’s a “long shot”, according to the chair of Aito Specialist Agents.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast about the lack of specialist help for the industry from Westminster, Gemma Antrobus, managing director of Haslemere Travel, predicted travel might get a look-in once the government had sorted out other priorities.
“I’m slightly hopeful that once the kids go back to school in the next week or so; and we’re over GCSEs and A Levels, that perhaps we then might get a window of opportunity to find some stability with the government, but that’s a long shot,” she said.
Antrobus said any action would come too late to save the summer, but added that there were key pinch points on the horizon with Atol renewals and the end of the furlough scheme and said sector-specific support was still urgently needed.
“On a wider scale beyond our individual little businesses, what happens, from the government’s perspective, when we come to the end of furlough? What happens if we keep going back and forth, with the on-off with all these different countries and we don’t open up some more, longer haul or mid-haul destinations?” she said.
“The UK outbound travel industry contributes £37 billion pounds to the Exchequer, that’s not a few quid – that’s more than farming and fishing together. And if they don’t have that, who’s going to plug that hole?
“What happens when there are mass redundancies, which very sadly, there will be more redundancies to come? What happens when more Atol-holders fail? Who pays for that? And it’s just this lack of joined-up thinking of the bigger picture of it all – and using the guise that they’re trying to keep everyone in the UK safe and it’s all about health and levels of Covid infection, to me is all a load of rubbish because if it was about that, we’d have shut our borders from the beginning.”
Antrobus added: “We kept our borders open when everyone was locked in their homes and as soon as they let them out of their homes, they mess around with the borders. That just doesn’t make any sense. They let Tom, Dick and Harry in for three months, and then won’t let us out. The larger scale implication of these little measures that change on a weekly basis is catastrophic and nobody is connecting the dots.
“That’s what’s really frustrating because we’re all doing our absolute utmost to look after our clients, keep our businesses going, look at how we can bring our staff back, how can we keep our businesses surviving and thriving over the next few months into next year, but for our industry as a whole, nobody’s even looking at it and nobody’s even taking care of it, and that’s really sad when it is such a massive part of our economy.”
Antrobus said the industry had been campaigning for support for months.
“With my Aito hat on, we have much more of an inroad into the government and Aito, along with the other associations, including Abta and the consortia, have been banging on the door since March. This is not a new thing that the industry is trying to talk to the government; we’ve been trying to do it for a long time to avoid situations like this. I think we all thought that the hard bit was lockdown; no-one could travel anywhere and it was really hard and really horrid.
“But at least when no-one could travel anywhere, there wasn’t this back and forth. And then of course, we open-up various parts of the world, then we take them back, then we take others back then we release others forward. And it’s just there’s no joined-up thinking and there’s no consideration for the overall impact of what is happening.”
Charles Duncombe, director of homeworking agency Holidaysplease, agreed the industry desperately needs sector-specific support but urged people not to hold their breath.
“At the best, the government has been firefighting. At worst, it just hasn’t been fighting at all. We just go from one thing to another and we’re now at a stage where we need to be looking strategically and long-term for this industry because it is hugely valuable to the government in terms of the exchequer, but the health and well-being of everyone here as well.
“They can’t just let the travel industry die. It provides so much for so many people who work in it and who use it and I think there does need to be a long-term view. The government does need to look at particular sectors,” he said.
Duncombe said he understood the government’s initial “blanket approach”.
“[It said] we’ll provide furlough support for everyone. And then you’ve had some companies who are doing so well, they voluntarily not taken the furlough; and they’ve not taken some of the tax breaks. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got certain sectors who are hit so much harder, that they need support for longer,” he said.
“And they’re in industries where furlough hasn’t necessarily been completely appropriate. We’ve all had to keep on a lot of our people to service customers. We’ve been working in some ways harder than we than we were before. And so I understand their one size fits all knee-jerk approach – it’s a crisis and that needed to be done. But we’ve had time to think and consider, I think the government should be looking more strategically, longer-term and identifying sectors within the economy that need that need particular help.”
Duncombe however was not hopeful support would be forthcoming.
“If it takes the government four months to finally admit that a refund credit note is an enforceable, Atol-backed entity, while other governments in Europe we’re signing off almost overnight, I mean what hope have we got for them to come up with anything strategic for the industry as a whole?” he added.
“Unfortunately, as much as I hate to say it, I just think we all need to assume the government isn’t really going to help and while we can all fight for it, we can all lobby and I’ve written to MPs and all sorts; and we’ve all done our bit and we try and go through voices like Abta, but it’s a case of hope for the best but plan for the worst. You’ve got to assume that we’re not going to get state aid.”