Travel agents have vowed not to let the Covid pandemic beat them but admit the situation has taken its toll and there have been many “dark days”.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, Tony Mann, director of Idle Travel in Bradford, said: “I try and look forward but I’ve never known anything like it, to be honest. It’s a real struggle. I keep saying, ‘Well it could be worse’, but it’s hard to see how it could be.
“This is going to have a toll on absolutely everybody. There can’t be many people who will come out of this who haven’t been affected deep down in some way, but I’ll flip the other way and think ‘it’s not going to beat me’,” he said.
Mann continued: “Nobody’s going to beat me; even the government – and all its stupidity – is not going beat me, even though it’s going to cost them money by not helping us. It’s ridiculous! Common sense should prevail, but I still keep thinking ‘we will continue; we will get through it’, but it’s really, really hard.”
He said closing the door to his agency at the start of lockdown was “heart-wrenching”.
“I found it really difficult being at home and not in the shop,” he said. “I still struggle but I’ll always try and look at the positive because if I look back, I feel like I’d crumble. Do I worry? Absolutely, I worry. And I speak to other people and the pressure that people are under is enormous, made worse through the actions of others as well.”
Charles Duncombe, director at homeworking agency Holidaysplease said he was conscious of the challenges faced by many people in his company but agreed the industry must persevere.
“We try and be very conscious of our homeworkers; helping them out financially; helping them out emotionally. We’ve got a support team and everything like that. But as Winston Churchill said, ‘When you’re going through hell, you just keep going’, don’t you? Because otherwise you’re never going to get out the other side. So, it’s horrible but you’ve just got to keep going and not let it beat you,” he said.
Duncombe said the crisis had presented him with challenges he had never faced as a business owner before, but he said: “The attitude I’ve taken is this is what I get paid for. It’s tough; it’s awful; there’s huge challenges that you have to confront every day. But while the business was doing really well, I was perfectly happy taking a nice salary and dividends and all that sort of stuff. And now when the brown stuff hits rotating stuff, for me, I just have a word with myself and I crack on.”
Duncombe said Holidaysplease was supporting a number of his hardest-hit homeworkers financially.
“We’ve tried to be mindful of that right from the get-go. And so even before locked down in March, we announced a £100,000 support fund if we had any homeworkers of ours who were financially going to struggle over the coming months and that was before the government announced the self-employed help scheme and we’ve had we’ve had people take us up on that. And hopefully that’s supported them.”
Gemma Antrobus, managing director of Haslemere Travel, said holidays would be the thing people turn to, to recover from the crisis.
“Through all of this, I’ve always been super optimistic about the fact that of all the industries to work in, travel isn’t so bad. It’s provided us with some great perks and we have been very lucky over the years to work and be able to travel as we do,” she said.
“And for our clients who’ve faced equal amounts of struggles as we have with their own businesses or their own jobs, people do look to have a holiday as a way of getting over things.
“If we can just sort out the government restrictions, I really do think there’s huge promise for the travel industry. It’s not a necessity to go on holiday, it’s a luxury item, but for some people, they see it as a necessity. So we are in the best place when people are going to be looking to get themselves out the other side of this situation; they’re going to be turning to professionals like us and we just have to hang on in there and when the dark days are really dark, you ring up your other travel agency friends who are having a good day and you get them to cheer you up.”