A leading travel agent has hit out at the “minefield” of PCR testing providers as she welcomed a crackdown on what the health secretary has dubbed “cowboy” firms.
The government’s vow to tackle rogue PCR test providers has seen more than 80 private testing companies issued a two-strike warning that could see them removed from gov.uk for misleading prices.
PCR tests have been billed as the gold-standard for Covid testing and require lab analysis. The government has made them a condition of any international travel, with travellers asked to take a test before travel and on arrival in the UK. The number of tests depending on which traffic light list a destination is on and vaccination status.
Gemma Antrobus, chair of Aito Specialist Travel Agents and owner of Haslemere Travel said the crackdown was “absolutely” welcome, but stressed: “In theory they should have never been on there in the first place because this list should have been a lot heavier vetted in the first place.”
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In an interview on BBC News, she said: “We are now learning that there are a number of companies on here that didn’t provide the right tests in the first place, or didn’t exist at all. The government were very specific with consumers and travellers that when they travelled they must have a test from one of the providers o this list. You would hope that they would’ve done their homework beforehand to ensure that those companies were the right ones for our consumers to be booking with.”
Asked about some testing firms’ misleading online prices, Antrobus added: “There were tests advertised in the £20 mark but if you clicked through you had to either drive a huge distance for a very tiny slot on a very specific day of the week – and it just wasn’t possible – but they were doing it to entice people in to book the tests.
“As a business, as a travel company, we ensure that we only work with a very few providers who we have vetted ourselves, who we have tested. We know that, should we have any issues, we can get through to them and ask any questions that we may have.”
She said that only around 10% of firms listed on the government website are accredited. “It’s an absolute minefield out there but we ensure we keep our list as concise as possible and keep on top of it to ensure that the standards are being met.”
She said Aito had produced the list to provide confidence to its members’ customers. “It’s really important as travel designers that we are giving the best advice we can do to our clients when it comes to travelling, the entry requirements to countries, the requirements to come back into the UK – so we need to ensure that we’re making it as straightforward as possible because it is so confusing.
“If you just give a traveller a list of hundreds and hundreds of suppliers and say ‘pick your own’, you never know what you are going to get into. It was really important for us as a small independent travel company to give that sort of service to our clients.”
Addressing the 57 companies that are being removed from the list, Antrobus said: “There was no due diligence done in the first place. These tests were brought in to monitor the variants of concern. We’ve already seen that these tests are not being sequenced in the number they should be [and] they’re not monitoring the variants of concern. I’m not sure what the tests are being used for.”
Antrobus called for tests to be made cheaper, including removing VAT, and to remove the need for both lateral flow and PCR testing.
“Surely what would be better to do is to use the lateral flow system and if a positive result is taken from the lateral flow test then move forward to the PCR test (for sequencing).”
Meanwhile, the boss of a major diagnostic firm welcomed a “cleaning out” of the market for Covid PCR test providers.
Randox founder Peter Fitzgerald welcomed an investigation of the sector by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is investigating pricing and reliability.
He told the BBC that some companies may not be delivering the service they claim to provide.
Fitzgerald defended Randox’s performance after some customers complained about late test results and pictures of overflowing drop boxes were shared on social media, noting occasional “surges” in demand.
The company processes about 50,000 travel tests a day and Fitzgerald told the BBC it had completed 16 million tests so far and “done a good job”.
But he said some providers had been “charging high amounts of money” or potentially not giving the service they claim to be giving.
Welcoming the CMA investigation, he said: “In many ways its quite good to have a cleaning out of the market and making sure you have suppliers who are doing the job right and not overcharging.”
Fitzgerald said it was very difficult to predict how long testing will continue to be a feature of international travel, but explained: “I think testing will be here for a while but we don’t know at what level.”