Jeremy Skidmore Comment: Does ABTA have a future?
There’s nothing like a bit of controversy for making people ask awkward questions. And after a traumatic couple of weeks for ABTA, the association has had to weather plenty of those. Firstly, an alleged internal fraud. Is the association rotten to the core? How can such a thing have gone unnoticed? Surely the internal security procedures are woefully inadequate? To be fair, this can happen to any company or association and, however rigorous your checks are, the determined employee can often bend the rules. The important thing is how you deal with the problem and ABTA appears to have dealt with it appropriately. Then there were complaints from TUI over the cost of ABTA’s new compulsory insurance training scheme. Surely, there’s a cheaper option? Here, a compromise is likely to be reached over costs. The big companies know that being policed by the Financial Services authority could be far worse than complying with an internal scheme. However, of greater concern than these two issues is the possibility that some operators may pull out of ABTA because the rules over bonding appear to be inconsistent. This has left people asking a much bigger question – does ABTA have a future? If a major player pulled out it would leave ABTA on a knife edge. And an operator will take the risk if it thinks the public will have confidence in its brand regardless of whether it is part of the association. ABTA often produces survey results which show that its name has huge recognition among the public and it is trusted as an organisation which will protect them in the event of a company failing. I don’t doubt that, but many people are now prepared to book cheap flights, hotels and packages over the Internet without much sign of protection. In this difficult economic climate ABTA will probably be able to convince all members that they are better off in the association than out. But one thing is clear – it needs to quickly adapt to the changing market conditions if it is to be seen as a forward-thinking organisation. Now is the time to open up to websites like expedia and lastminute.com, which may not previously have been able to join the association because their balance sheets haven’t demonstrated consistent profits over a number of years. These companies are big players and are set to have an even bigger influence in the future. Without them ABTA looks old-fashioned and stuffy and no-one wants to be associated with that image. ABTA is big enough to survive its recent setbacks. But to quote a hackneyed old phrase which has been trotted out at numerous conferences, it needs to keep changing otherwise it will quickly find itself going backwards.
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