In a statement Julia Lo Bue-Said said she "severely questioned the commercial sense in the move".
 
"I’m intrigued to understand how you can make ’holidays come alive’ direct? As quoted by Mark Anderson in this morning’s trade media (see TTG story)
 
"With 10% of its distribution about to be turned off, I wonder whether the Virgin Holidays executives have given any real thought about who will be the beneficiaries of this sales volume.
 
"To suggest this is not a reflection of the trade is an insult and at times like this you would like to see a little humanity and common sense from a business like Virgin Holidays."

Lo Bue Said also questioned the thinking behind the decision, adding: "The reasons given to us are that Virgin Holidays want to control the end to end customer experience - does this mean the service agents deliver isn’t up to their expectations? What is that? It certainly doesn’t demonstrate that they believe it’s a good one or perhaps I am being too pessimistic.
 
"Over the past ten years Virgin Holidays have followed a policy of deliberately discounting their products to customers, offering a discount for booking direct, forcing agents to switch sell to other business partners, of which there is ample choice.
 
"No one can control a customer and no one owns a customer. A customer has a choice and Virgin Holidays want to remove that from them."

Lo Bue Said she believed this was now "a great opportunity for agents to engage with and support those suppliers that truly value their business".

"In such a competitive market place, grown up decisions need to be made as to which partners are worth backing. After all, an agent is acting on behalf of the principal but in order to do so successfully there are key business practices that need adopting:  Price parity, sensible remuneration and agent partner support are just a few elements agents require in order to be effective resellers.
 
"As a parallel, we recently saw Lufthansa impose a charge for all bookings made by the trade when not booking through their trade website. A stance which has already resulted in a detrimental impact on their sales through the trade
 
"Virgin Holidays is giving its agent partners no choice, but for our agents we are providing them with a number of options on who will be the beneficiaries of the 10% of volume that Virgin Holidays does not value."