Travelmole guest comment: Peter Muller, ATPI divisional managing director UK, US and France
Wednesday, 14 Oct, 2010
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I attended Travelmole’s travel industry debate sponsored by ASB Law regarding how we as an industry can better lobby the government recently.
The session was lively and brought to the fore many general issues that we all need to consider as players in the business of travel, from how we work together to get our voice heard in parliament through to spending cuts and how this will affect the industry’s growth (or even survival) in some cases.
We all await the government spending review on October 20 with interest. Until then, we can only imagine the true impact of the Government’s cuts.
Once we know what they plan to put in place and when, then business leaders can plan and build our own trading strategies around the new landscape.
Until then it’s simply business as usual. Many of the much talked about changes will be a long way off and the reality is that we all need to focus on trading now and building strong and robust businesses that can weather any major change.
Whilst we have seen good steady recovery in the first quarter of this year, where air, hotel, rail and car hire transactions have increased year on year over the same period in 2009 (May), there are key issues which went unaddressed at the debate.
It seems that the general opinion is that this Government is strongly in favour of rail and all things rail, and that it looks less favourably towards aviation.
As an island nation, it’s critical that we continue to promote ourselves as a player in the international market place and to do this we need good, affordable international connectivity, that promotes UK plc as a pro business environment.
So whilst we understand the need to raise money and back a fair tax take and are willing to step up to the plate and support debt reduction, we do strongly encourage the industry to call for the Government to understand the need to keep the UK plc on the international business map and to do this we simply cannot price travel to and from our island nation out of the market.
Dinah
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