I don’t really “do” holidays. I used to, but nowadays I just stick to business travel. It’s easier and involves none of this reasearching and quoting only to find the client has gone off and booked somewhere else ‘cos it was n pounds cheaper. Fine. Do your own research or get someone else to put in quite a few hours work for nothing.
The failure of Freedom Direct heralded something new, that being an internet travel company going down the tubes. Why this is new, is because, unlike days of yore, there is no immediate ability to achieve face to face contact – something which clients who stood to lose their holidays would much prefer to have. If a tour operator went bust, you marched off down to your travel agent and were able to talk to someone. You could get some sort of satisfaction from knowing that a real human was dealing with your plight. An internet travel outfit may be miles away from you, even in another country and there is no “local” shop to go to. True, people used to book direct before the internet, but these were with companies whose name you did see in the “local” shop and this brought a sort of comfort. The plight of some of those caught in the FD collapse is well reflected in the travel-rants blog.
So, what can be done to get some sort of stability back? A while back (pre-1992) and before the EEC started their usual business or running around, identifying problems that did not exist, analysing them incorrectly and then applying wholly inappropriate solutions, we had something called “stabiliser”. Stabiliser came about in the early years of mass travel after a company called Fiesta (and a few others) went bust in about 1960- something, stranding many holdaymakers abroad and costing many others their holidays, without any form of redress. Why this was important, was because the annual holiday represented a huge chunk of a families’ annual outgoings – in fact probably the largest chunk of peoples’ annual outgoing. Secondly, it was also realised that in holiday travel, you take vast great sums of money and sit on them for quite a while. Given the tight margins, occasioned first, by the desire to offer cheap holidays to a mass market to get the market going and subsequently the “Oh! Dear! We have done this cheap bit rather well and now can’t get the prices up to a realistic level” – wise heads at ABTA realised (rather than the Government of the time, realised) that something should be done about this – PDQ.
What they came up with was “stabiliser” and it worked like this: In order to sell an inclusive holiday, that is, a hotel and a charter flight and all the gubbins together in one lump, you must supply a bond. In order to put together all the gubbins, you must supply a bond. And everyone must be a member of ABTA. An ABTA agent may only sell ABTA bonded opertors and ABTA bonded operators may sell direct or only through ABTA bonded agents. And do you know what? It worked! You did not have to worry about anything, how your holiday was booked, with whom – it could be with a big operator or through a bloke who also ran a small fish and chip shop just south of Hull, if they were ABTA – you were covered.
ABTA policed this vigorously and with real teeth. Failure to perform according to the Code of Conduct meant fines – some quite hefty. No pay and you were slung out and bang went your livelehood. The public were educated that the ABTA logo meant what it said – security – and even though some notable crashes such as Court Line, Intasun and Exchange travel nearly broke ABTA, the trade rallied round and no holiday maker ever lost out. Ever. This was WYSIWYG protection.
“Hang on!” said the Office of Fair Trading, “This is a cartel!” Yes, it was but to so high an eminenence had the cartels’ credit been advanced that the Court of Appeal, in the mid-1980’s ruled that it was in the public interest. It was a cartel that you could, however, get into. It was not an exclusion because people were black-balled – you had to fulfill certain criteria. You had to have a set amount of fixed assets and or capital, you had to demonstrate profitablility, you had to acheive certain standards in your shop or operation, in terms of trained staff and qualifications, you had to make returns to ABTA showing your trading situation and ABTA could (and did) come around to you and check – and unlike, it seems, the FSA, the ABTA people knew what they were looking at. Indeed, even the House of Commons highlighted ABTA’s governance as a shining light of trade self-regulation. Yes, the system worked and it worked very well indeed.
There was a regional system of elected management within ABTA with elected members who were, in the main, our wise heads and some of the greatest luminaries of travel. Some vested interest moaned because bonding was a large cost, which was strange, because the level of you bond reflected how well you ran your business and how stable it was (IATA, at that time, before IATA became an outfit that makes the Stalin regieme look saintly, did pretty much the same thing) and the barrier to entry was high (why not?).
There was another issue that, once a tour operator was a member there was no guarantee that all ABTA agents would sell your product, just that they could . Some moaned that that was unfair. Here, the simple point remained, if your product was good, agents would sell it, if it wasn’t….
There was none of this nonsense about what is a package, what bit is covered by what, who is responsible for what and so on and so forth. One agency for bonding, one point of contact. It was simple, it was effective. Hell! Even the airlines liked it! For selling their discounted air products, they knew they were dealing with (even though they did not come under the ABTA banner as such) a stable and secure agent.
Anyway, we are stuck with the unholy mess we have now, because the simple maxim “If it is not broken, do not try and fix it” was for the EEC and others, to tempting to resist. We could look at a return to stabiliser but there is not, yet, the political will and it would mean telling Brussels to go in the general direction of away. Further, the wise heads of travel have in many cases passed over and what we are left with are people within travel whose motivation may not be so widely directed towards the good of travel in general; more to personal profit and interest. Travel lacks Statesmen; youth took apart the past and threw away the instruction manual. Progress is good and neccessary, new ideas are welcome and we need them, but perhaps we should not go from “new idea” to “full implementation” in less than 5 nanoseconds, not when we are responsible for so much, for so many.
