David Crossland has a right to be upset now that a full investigation into Airtours’ takeover of First Choice has been instigated by the European Commission.
After all, the British Government has allowed him and others to believe they could do what they want with the UK travel industry.
I have never been a big fan of Brussels but all I can say is thank goodness we’ve got them to keep an eye on our UK Government policy.
Let’s not forget what a ‘free market’ is. It’s the replacement of Government regulation of an industry with industry regulation by the most powerful players. I know which I prefer.
Now let’s cut the rubbish about the availability of aircraft and avoid red herrings like ad hoc charters over a European football championship weekend, as Crossland was talking about in Travel Weekly last week.
Sunvil has had over 20% of its 2000 charter capacity withdrawn by a vertically integrated company. Many other independent tour operators have suffered in the same way but are frightened to say so publicly. They are frightened because they rely on these same companies to distribute their holidays and because they are hoping to pick up the flying scraps from the in-house operator’s table and do not want to antagonise.
Let me explain the problem once and for all. A charter-based operator is a risk taker and invests tens of thousands of pounds in developing a route. The charter airline provides the aircraft but, unlike the scheduled carrier, carries none of the risk and costs of route development.
When the vertically integrated operator asks its in-house airline to take the aircraft away from the independent operator it does so for two reasons. One, because it wants to muscle in on the route, expand its capacity to the destination at the expense of the independent operator who may well have developed it, or it needs the aircraft to fly somewhere else.
Now, the problem is that the precious Gatwick slot goes with the charter carrier and not with the operator who has developed the destination. So, even if another aircraft has been found there is no guarantee that operator will be able to fly clients on the day and time it has spent years developing.
We independent operators are pouring enormous amounts of money into the coffers of our vertically integrated competitors, helping them to put us out of business.
This must be stopped. We must allow the emergence of independent carriers and they must be allocated slots at Gatwick. Those slots must be made available to the operator on the route and should be the operator’s property until it is given up. We do not all choose to be Crosslands but we each have our part to play in the tourism process and are no more or less important.
We must be allowed to have some rights and the regulators cannot allow the consolidation process to progress even further. We must stop at four players especially when Airtours and Thomas Cook have shareholding links.
There is no substitute for Caledonian and Monarch, and Sabre cannot fill the gap. Bringing in foreign aircraft does not help, especially after the publicity war that has been waged against foreign charter airline names in the past.