The heads of Abta, the Business Travel Association (BTA) and Institute of Travel Management (ITM) hailed the heightened degree of cooperation between associations forged by the pandemic when they appeared at the BTA conference in Belfast last week.
But BTA chief executive Clive Wratten suggested the associations should have been “more forceful” in their messaging.
Wratten told the conference “We realised we needed to work together pretty quickly” yet acknowledged they could have done so sooner.
He said: “If I have a criticism, it’s that we didn’t work closely enough at the beginning. We were working out what the hell to do.”
Wratten also suggested the associations should have been “more direct in our messaging earlier, more forceful. It might have persuaded others to get behind us more.”
Abta chief executive Mark Tanzer agreed the cooperation had been important, saying: “One of the purposes of a trade association is to associate.
“We provide tailored advice to members and there is a case for having disaggregated associations for that, but there is also a case for coming together on issues we share.”
He told the BTA conference: “It has been an extraordinary time. We probably lost 30-40 members. But if you told me at the outset that travel would be stopped for two years, I’d have said we’d lose a lot more.”
However, Tanzer warned: “We’re not out of Covid yet. There is the possibility of a Covid variant and we don’t want to go back to a stop-start regime.
“Members are in a difficult financial position with rising costs and without the financial headroom they had pre-Covid. If we go into another dip, we’re going to need help.”
ITM chief executive Scott Davies said: “It has been great to have the cooperation.” But he described the environment the associations are operating in as “unprecedented”, saying: “We need new people to come into the industry. We all talk about this, but we don’t get anywhere.”
Tanzer agreed: “A lot of people left travel and haven’t come back, and we have to think how we recruit.”
Wratten suggested the industry “has become unappealing” and said: “I got particularly upset with the press slagging us off all through the summer. People were turning up to work every day and being slagged off.”