Scotland’s travel industry is joining forces for a mass protest outside the Scottish Parliament today
The Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association lobby of Holyrood will urge MSPs to ‘save Scottish travel’ by providing tailored support for the country’s travel sector.
Members also want an affordable Covid testing system to be introduced by Christmas to allow international travel to take off once again, with an end to quarantine regulations on return from overseas travel.
As many as 150 agents, operators and travel associates wearing save Scottish travel face masks, will brandish placards and hazard-tape bound passports, while waving flags of the world outside the Parliament building.
They argue that Scotland’s 26,000 travel sector jobs are at risk without a clear strategy and action plan for how the Scottish and UK governments will get travel moving again.
The 120-member SPAA estimates that there are 5,000 travel agency staff in 250 high street premises in Scotland and several hundred home workers.
Association members indicate that at least 500 jobs have already been lost since March and the rate of job losses will accelerate rapidly as the industry enters a second year of zero revenue.
Travel agencies are handling between 8% and 11% of the volume of work of previous years – with the bulk of the current activity being admin related to refunds and bookings.
Passengers using Edinburgh airport between April and September fell by 91% on the previous year and Glasgow airport said in June that traffic was down 98% on 2019.
SPAA president Joanne Dooey described travel as “broken” and warned: “We are at serious and immediate risk of losing Scotland’s travel industry and the 26,000 jobs which the industry supports.
“It seems as if the Scottish government has completely turned its back on the travel industry which is massively short sighted. Scotland is a small country which needs its connectivity to the rest of the globe. We have already lost routes and more is imminent. If this happens it will be a catastrophe for the Scottish economy.
“Travel agents are broken – and broke. The financial model of the travel industry means that agents did all the work for summer 2020 bookings in autumn 2019 but they didn’t receive a penny of the money paid by their customer as this goes immediately and directly to the tour operator.
“Travel agents receive their fees eight weeks or so before departure date. No departures meant zero revenue.
“It’s clear that the financial model of the travel industry is neither understood nor differentiated by the Scottish government from the domestic hospitality and tourism sector.
“As an industry, we have refunded our customers despite not always having received the refunds from the operators and airlines. We’ve lost all of our revenue for 2020 and we’re now facing the whole of 2021 with zero revenue. We urgently need a tailored support package of grants for the industry.”
Dooey added: “Rapid airport covid testing could save the Scottish travel industry. People want to travel but are put off by the ever-changing travel corridors and the possibility of having to quarantine for 14 days, even if on departure their destination was on the ‘safe list’. Or, that a holiday will be cancelled at short notice.
“Pre-departure Covid testing could be the lifeline for travel and this should lead to multi-lateral testing arrangements with other countries.
“Travel agencies have faced, and continue to face, an utterly torrid time and there’s currently no light at the end of the tunnel for us. There are massive mental health and wellbeing issues for a sector on the edge.
“Not only did many struggle to access business support, but we were forced to keep staff working rather than on furlough in order to process hundreds of thousands of bookings since March.
“Travel agents were refunding clients for work they did in 2019, from their own pockets as they awaited the return of monies from operators and airlines. They had to pay staff to work to process this tsunami of refunds at a time when they had zero income. And to add insult to injury we’ve had to refund non recoverable credit card fees on the sale and again to process the refund.
“Now, many agency owners are facing difficulty accessing bank loans. They have used all their savings and are now using their pension funds to stay afloat and are teetering on the brink.”