The travel industry risks being “overly negative” in its dealings with government and can’t hope to have the ear of ministers and officials unless it acknowledges the support it received during the pandemic.
That is according to Abta director of public affairs Luke Petherbridge who warned: “The industry would be making a mistake if it refused to acknowledge it had support from the government.
“There was a lot of frustration, but one of the things that came out of the pandemic was how closely the industry worked together and keeping that collaboration going is important.”
Speaking at Abta’s Travel Matters conference in London on Tuesday, Petherbridge argued: “We shouldn’t be overly negative and not acknowledge what the government did during the pandemic.”
He pointed to the furlough scheme and to the availability of loans, saying “seven in 10 business took a government-backed loan.
“We had refund credit notes which the government stood behind, and we had lockdown restriction support grants.”
He added: “If you look beyond the UK, the government was not wildly out of step with the rest of the world, and after Omicron we re-opened really quickly, so there are signs we were getting our voice heard.”
Petherbridge noted the increasingly poor economic outlook and said: “We hope the government is cognisant that we are going from one crisis to another. This is an economy-wide crisis, but we’re not all starting from the same place. The domestic economy opened up in 2021.”
Nikki da Costa, former director of legislative affairs at No 10 Downing Street, said capturing the attention of ministers required “positive ideas”, and described the ratio of positive to negative views submitted by industry as “about one to 10”.
She told the conference: “There is dearth of positive ideas. Everyone is good at saying ‘don’t do this’. But I never met a minister who didn’t jump at a positive idea.”
Aviation minister Baroness Vere agreed and called for “clear, positive ideas” from the sector. She said: “Don’t just tell me what is wrong.”