THE Pacific Asia Travel Association is considering reintroducing regional workshops to forge closer links with agents based outside London.
It has already agreed to hold a workshop immediately following the ABTA Midland Region meeting being held at the Forte Posthouse Hotel at Birmingham Airport on July 1, and if this is successful it may hold similar events across the UK.
PATA UK executive director David Arscott said: “We are using this as a pilot – if there is a good turnout and agents like it we may do others.”
PATA gave up organising regional workshops a couple of years ago after interest from agents started to wane.
Instead, it launched a disk-based distance learning programme last year which has just won the UK Chapter the PATA Award of Excellence.
“It is always difficult to get people to give up their evenings to attend workshops when they have been working all day, and a lot of our regional workshops in the past have not been as successful as we had hoped they would,” said Arscott.
“Members decided they would prefer to have a training programme for travel agents instead, and putting that together has taken an awful lot of time.
“But we have always kept an open mind about reintroducing workshops and as ABTA’s regional meetings are very well attended we decided to accept their invitation to attend the Midland Region meeting with a view to organising other events outside London if it goes well.”
He said up to 20 Chapter members were planning to attend the Birmingham workshop in the hope of meeting 100 to 150 agents. PATA is hosting a barbecue after the event.
n See Travel Weekly’s Focus Asia on June 21for more on the PATA and EATA training schemes.