The association said a headline from The Telegraph on Friday (10 February) which read "Surge from travel agents helped UK to dodge recession" came "in sharp contrast" to the government’s own outlook.
The Telegraph story picked up on data from Capital Economics, which revealed the sector providing the largest positive contribution to UK growth in the last three months of 2022 (+14.8%) was administrative and support service activities – "particularly travel agents".
It reinforced data from Barclays issued days earlier suggesting this trend towards growth in travel spend had continued into the new year, with payments to agents in January up 83.1% year-on-year and to airlines up 75.7%.
Total spend across the sector, according to Barclays’ debit and credit card data, showed a 66% increase in spend on travel in January 2023 compared with January 2022.
Aito said that given the sector’s performance, it was surprising the sector didn’t feature at all in the government’s recently-published 15-page paper "Making government deliver for the British people" – it being most notably absent from a section entitled "Updating the machinery of government for the world of today and tomorrow".
"What exactly should the many thousands of us working in travel make of this?” said Aito director Noel Josephides, who queried why the government is yet to find a proper home for the outbound travel sector – a point highlighted by Aito and the Advantage Travel Partnership last week after prime minister Rishi Sunak confirmed plans to dismantle the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) and share out its portfolios across four new business-related departments.
Beis was one of five government departments and/or bodies previously sharing responsibility for outbound travel, it being tasked with overseeing reform of the Package Travel Regulations.
Overlooked
"On the one hand, we are much-lauded for helping UK PLC to dodge a recession," Josephides continued. "Yet - despite previously being beholden to no less than five government ministries (the Foreign Office, Beis, Department for Transport, CAA and Department for Culture, Media and Sport) – now it seems no ministry has been asked to include the superlative travel industry, with its many thousands of employees and its massive delivery to UK PLC’s bottom line, in its portfolio."
Josephides said the government’s failure to acknowledge the sector was all the more surprising given travel’s successful emergence from the Covid crisis over the past year came despite data from the Office for National Statistics suggesting the travel industry was the most severely affected by the pandemic.
He called for ministers to lay new groundwork for the sector to prosper, highlighting – in particular – plans to reform the Atol scheme, describing the rules governing financial protection in travel as "unnecessarily complex and costly".
