NOEL Josephides’ comments regarding his frustration at airline schedule charges (Travel Weekly March 29) strikes a chord with all scheduled tour operators and highlights the inequality of commitment in the promotion of leisure traffic with all scheduled carriers.
As tour operators we are courted and cajoled to feature new (and established) services and airlines confirm availability and schedules well ahead.
We brochure new routes and timings and commitourselves to our customers.
We all dread the spring and autumn period when our computer reservations systemssuddenly spout outmassive queues of schedule changes reflecting new timings and changing confirmed travel details.
All this work reconfirming arrangements to passengers and amending complicated itineraries has to be done by operators at a heavy cost to us.
It’s a fact that mostscheduled airlines, and other transportation carriers, impose 100% cancellation fees after ticket issue although thecancelled seat may well be sold that day at premium-class fares, often up to 500% more than the leisure fare it was originally sold at.
As tour operators, we are often in the firing line, about to be challenged by the Office of Fair Tradingand otherconsumer groups overcancellation terms.
In the vast majority of cases we are only passing on imposed costs.
Now that leisure traffic is an accepted and necessary part of any scheduled airline yield mix, airlines must accept the costs that their random late advice of schedule charges incur on operators andcustomers alike.
We must be given reciprocal rights to compensation when such commercial decisions are taken in the airlines’ andcarriers’ own interests.
In its 1999 workplan, ABTA’s aviation committee will be addressing this concern and open up discussions with carriers to address this blatant inequality.
It’s about time the tables were turned and the playing field was levelled.
John Harding
Sales director
Travelscene
West Yorkshire