08 October 2008

ABTA TRAVEL CONVENTION BLOG: Taxi for Broughton

Every great play needs a hate figure and one emerged in the unlikely guise of British Airways chairman Martin Broughton on the first day of the ABTA Travel Convention.

It was all going so smoothly as Martin, also the president of the CBI, imparted some words of wisdom about the credit crunch and sounded optimistic about the future.

But then a four letter word Ã¢â¬' levy Ã¢â¬' was dropped and it became clear that he was the only person in the convention hall who didnÃ¢â¬â¢t agree with paying for financial protection for airline customers.

Why should big, successful BA subsidise the small, unstable airlines?, was the gist of the argument that no-one wanted to hear.

Shortly after his session, moderator Jeremy Vine (did he mention he worked for Radio 2?) revealed Martin had already left the country. Not quite sure whether that was for his own safety.

Mark Pragnell, the managing director for the Centre for Economics and Business Research, made a curateÃ¢â¬â¢s egg (good in parts, for those of you who didnÃ¢â¬â¢t go to school) of a speech.

For the first 20 minutes, he explained the causes of the current credit crisis, which was particularly useful for those delegates who havenÃ¢â¬â¢t read a newspaper or watched or heard a news bulletin for the past year.

But he recovered with some excellent predictions about what will happen in the economy over the next couple of years.

However, he did admit that economists are usually wrong. Yours truly was once an economist, so youÃ¢â¬â¢ll probably agree with him.

By midday-ish, we were on a roll with the reliable Malcolm Preston coming out with interesting statistics about how well agents were doing, ably backed up by ABTA bods Mark Tanzer, Steven Freudmann and Stewart Baird.

Then it was time to get all loved up with a session on how to be happy at work. I have to say that this is exactly the kind of thing that sends most journalists looking for the nearest bucket and, when Happy chief executive Henry Stewart asked people to talk to their neighbours at work about three things that were important to them, I immediately turned to a colleague and started waffling about sex, football and cricket, but not necessarily in that order.

But hey, these sessions are not designed for the benefit of cynical old hacks like myself but for conference delegates, and judging by the enthusiastic audience participation in various tasks, they were mad for it.

A lively question time finished off the day as the levy was chewed over and the term scandalous used to describe bookies who take bets on who next will go to the wall.

Some good stuff, I have to admit.

At the end of day one: ABTA 1, Moaning hacks like myself 0.

By Jeremy Skidmore