The reintroduction of pre-departure testing from 4am today (7 December) comes as yet another hammer blow to travel – an industry for which Covid upheaval and distress has become part of every-day operational life.
Some may disagree, but there are undoubtedly still strong public health and moral arguments for even some of the most draconian measures the UK government has inflicted on us all over the past 20 months. Tens of thousands of new cases of Covid-19 continue to be reported every day, as well as hundreds more deaths. At the current rate, the UK’s Covid death toll will likely top 150,000 by Christmas.
Credit where credit is due then as it was actually transport secretary Grant Shapps who just a few days ago offered perhaps the balanced take on the intersection of public health and travel restrictions. In an interview with The Telegraph’s Christopher Hope, Shapps said the government didn’t want to "kill off the travel sector again" with the reintroduction of pre-departure testing. “This government thinks we should take a calibrated response, which doesn’t take us right back to the beginning of this [pandemic]," said Shapps. Hear hear.
A proportional, "calibrated" response to the challenge of balancing the dilemmas posed by this pandemic, one our industry – incidentally – has neither denied exists or refuted the complexity of, is all travel has ever asked for.
In fact, the reintroduction of Day 2 PCR testing and the addition of 10 southern African countries to the UK’s red list late last month following the emergence of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 didn’t actually raise as much consternation as might have been expected.
The problem, though, remains one of communication. Such was the speed of the government’s response, coming as ever without a hint of notice, it pulled the rug out from under people’s feet and plunged a not insignificant part of our travel sector into immediate chaos.
It forced thousands of people, many of whom have for the best part of a year been unable to visit much of southern Africa, to attempt to flee in the hope of getting home before the drawbridge was raised with the spectre of a £2,285 bill for 10 days’ hotel quarantine looming large. Even with extensive industry contacts at his disposal, Chris Mears, managing director of Experience Africa Events, described the experience to TTG as one of "extreme stress”.
A week later, and travel finds itself tearing its hair out all over again. But this time, the chaos is everyone’s problem. Saturday’s announcement started dribbling out at about 6pm. First came the leaks, the tip-offs and the briefings, then the snatched statements to the national media, and finally the ill-coordinated flurry of tweets. Neither Sajid Javid nor Grant Shapps could agree on the details in their tweets. Shapps actually had to delete his and post it again two hours’ later.
The official statements and press release didn’t land in my inbox until 7.30pm despite requests to both the Department for Transport and the Department of Health. As I write this, it’s still not clear what the exact timeframe is for these pre-departure tests.
’Simple message’
It brings us back to communication. I was at the Jet2 conference late last month where the airline and operator’s outspoken chief executive Steve Heapy got up on stage and defended the government’s record on Covid support, at least with regards to the economic safeguards it introduced. His criticism? Communication. "The communication from government was very poor," he said, in reference to the government’s record throughout the pandemic.
You would be hard-pressed to come up with another industry that has been talked about in such a careless and blasé manner as travel, and treated with such consistent disdain. There have been times when it has felt like ministers have been queuing up to put the boot in. Cast your minds back to all those loose comments on breakfast television telling people not to book holidays, let alone attempt to travel.
The changes to the UK’s travel rules announced in October gave cause for optimism; they created a trading environment in which agents could sell – and clients could travel – with confidence. That confidence is evaporating, again.
I was on the train home from the Aito conference when the news broke on Saturday night. My first thought was for Shapps’ comments about "killing off the travel sector again", which were published barely 24 hours before news of the latest set of government actions that risk doing exactly that. Shapps even felt the need to address the situation, tweeting his comments on pre-departure tests had been recorded earlier in the week and that the situation "had moved on". Moved on? Or did the Department of Health pull rank?
Either way, would it really hurt to explain the rationale? The offer of some genuine insight into how things moved on so sufficiently in just a few days as to necessitate this action would go a long way towards softening the blow. Again, we’re back to that word again – communication.
My second, and enduring, thought was for all the happy, smiling faces I saw at the Aito conference who spoke excitedly for two days about the feeling of finally having turned a corner, and how they were taking their clients and customers with them. On our journeys home, that corner turned out to be another hairpin bend.
As my colleagues and I scrambled to make sense of what was going on via WhatsApp, my Twitter mentions went berserk. For the second Saturday in succession, agents put down their well-earned glasses of wine, walked away from engagements with family and friends, and picked up the phone to their understandably worried clients. These people understand the importance of proper communication at times of crisis.
They’ve also learned a thing or two about speaking their minds, a quick skim through the replies to Shapps and Javid’s Twitter timelines reveals.
So with all that in mind, I’ll keep this message simple. Grant, Sajid, Rishi – we just can’t go on like this. It’s been 20 months. Travel deserves so much better. Covid is undoubtedly still a threat to the nation’s health and our way of life. Travel understands this. It understands you have to make tough decisions that will impact its ability to trade. It understands this crisis is far from over.
So please, give travel the support it needs – and deserves. And do it now before you really do kill off the sector.
James Chapple is TTG’s acting news editor.
