Derek Moore, deputy chairman of Aito and co-founder of Explore takes stock of 2020 and looks forward to 2021
It is ironic that there is a phrase which refers to the ability to see everything clearly – 20:20 vision.
For the travel industry the phrase probably indicates not a clear vision, but a vision of hell. 2020 could well be described as ‘The Year of the Unthinkable’. A year when so much of what took place was surely unimaginable, which led so many in the travel business to think the unthinkable and enact the unimaginable.
The travel business is often described as resilient. We got through the downturn in travel during the Gulf War in 1991 (for those of us old enough to remember that), we recovered from 9/11 in 2001, from Sars and the economic downturn of 2008. But there has been nothing as cataclysmic as Covid-19, with its twin effects both on lives and on livelihoods. Again and again throughout the year, travel had to cope with so much that we could never have imagined: the unthinkable.
Sectors of travel that were, like the Titanic, seen as unsinkable, shuddered and ground to a halt. We are all familiar with the fact that major airlines have for years fought against having a levy on all air tickets, arguing that they, the big carriers, would never go bust. But British Airways and others didn’t see this coming. And the airline industry suffered a devastation of it businesses that must have been unimaginable.
The cruise industry, thriving, growing and diversifying over recent years could never have imagined that entire ships would have to be quarantined. That what made cruises so much fun – being in close proximity to many like-minded cruisers – now spelt the death-knell of such a vibrant sector.
And the entire UK travel industry could never have imagined that government knew so little about how it works that it could, unknowingly and seemingly uncaringly, ignore the plight of businesses with no income for most of the year and ignore staff who had to work flat out to handle refunds before then being furloughed or fired.
And the Package Travel Regulations, originally put together in 1992 for a vastly different industry and tweaked again in 2018, turned out to be unimaginably unfit for purpose. Both the government and the travelling public failed (perhaps understandably where the public were concerned) to understand the rigid rules that demanded operators with no cash were required to provide refunds from out of nowhere. Operators with cash in the bank were, of course, able to refund passengers anyway and, in some cases, crow about it.
How unimaginable was it that, after building up a travel business for perhaps 20 or 30 years, some had to face the fact that if they survive this year then, because they didn’t rush to offer refunds, their clients may not return.
Some businesses made friends of their clients by refunding, others made enemies by not being able to refund through no fault of their own. One key reason many were unable to refund was because they were owed money by the airlines they had chosen to use for their clients. Again, it was unimaginable to many that their airline – ‘come fly the friendly skies with us’ – could show either a complete lack of understanding of the position of their tour operator clients, or an attitude of just not caring about them. With airlines playing hardball on one side and the government playing dumb on the other, travel businesses were squeezed for much of the year by forces they could never have imagined or foreseen. The net result is that much of the travelling public have lost faith in their travel suppliers – be they operators or agents.
Struggling to find a crumb of positivity amongst the nightmare, I finally found a few.
The stories of travel agents, in particular, who did unimaginable things for their clients. Handling refunds despite the abuse, and at times working all hours to re-book clients, get them home somehow, anyhow. The light in the dark, amid the pages of Travel Weekly, was the frequency of stories of travel agents – some of them about to run out of cash and close down – going the extra mile.
Support for charities has been unimaginable too. Abta Lifeline has raised more than £20,000 for its TravelCares appeal, Chris Lee and Melissa Tilling started the Charitable Travel Foundation to support employees in the travel industry abroad, and we were surprised at the response the Derek Moore Foundation received when we asked people to donate the price of a meal they would have bought had they gone abroad. There is always a silver lining.
The travel business has always had the ability to adapt quickly. Several adventure operators, known for treks in far-off lands, put out programmes in various parts of the UK, keeping the camaraderie of group travel but offering it on peoples’ doorstep. At sea, in a nod to the cruise industry an entrepreneur has been running boat trips to view the armada of cruise-ships riding at anchor just off-shore.
We have seen some ‘scenes we never expected to see’ in 2020. Gatwick and Heathrow, like the terraces at football matches or grandstands at F1 races, have been deserted.
And looking forward, what of 2021?
Firstly, there is no doubt there is an unimaginable pent-up demand for travel, with regular travellers bursting to get going – somewhere. Best guess for most operators to start getting back to some sort of normality seems to be ‘spring possible, summer definitely’. But things may well be different.
Many tour operators will be smaller than before (their small size will possibly have been what allowed them to effectively mothball for some months). At least initially, scheduled flight programmes will be reduced. The likes of Jet2 and easyJet, with their own aircraft and tour operations to fill, have already announced a swathe of new seats for 2021, but they may be the exception.
Business travel might find it difficult to return to normal as Zoom has become the businessman’s friend and brief dashes overseas might seem much less necessary. Since the front end has always been where airlines make their money, we have to hope they will reduce schedules rather than trying to fill the plane with more economy passengers contributing to more over-tourism.
Pricing in 2021 might show a dichotomy. Some specialist operators may well maintain prices while offering less capacity to cope with the perceived demand while volume operators will in all probability engage in a fight to the bottom to tempt the price-driven mass market.
Will airlines agree to a level playing field with regard to adding, say, £2.50 to all their flights now we have seen that anyone can fail? Probably not, but we can always hope they see reason, or the government makes them.
While the industry awaits vaccines to be rolled out en masse, and a return to something approaching normality, it has a golden opportunity to take a blank sheet of paper and re-design itself to make flying match demand instead of driving it upwards with excess capacity, encouraging people to fly less and stay longer. In this respect, I suspect smaller operators and specialised travel agents will seize the opportunity to re-think what they offer and make travel more sustainable. Larger operators will, I fear, seek to return the industry to the old normal.
With Aito, Lata, Pata and Atta now talking together about how to affect real change in travel in 2021, we can at least hope the industry will change for the better. Dare we hope sustainability comes more to the fore in industry-thinking in 2021? For that not to be so would, I have to say, be unthinkable.