Speaking on the second day of the ITT Conference in Sicily, Fallon told delegates there was no denying the world was becoming a more dangerous place.
“That is beyond question,” he said. “We’ve seen the rise of atrocities in places such as China, Russia and Turkey; we’ve seen treaties breached by Iran and Russia; we’ve seen the World Trade Organisation under increasing pressure from America; we’ve seen the rise in regional tension in the Far East; and there has been a dramatic resurgence of Russia, which has been using force to intervene in Syria. Russia now spends 5% of their GDP on defence.
“Finally this century we’ve seen the rise of international terrorism in all kinds of attacks - high level, mid level and even low level… and for the first time these are completely indiscriminately, they are happy to kill innocents.
“This clearly impacts on you as an industry,” Fallon acknowledged. “And it’s going to continue having more of an impact, because as more people travel, they [the terrorists] are presented with a widening range of targets. So these destinations become riskier – we’ve seen that with the closure of Sharm; the massacre at Sousse.”
Fallon said it was “his judgement that these risks would only grow, as terrorists themselves understand the value of publicity and the impact of attacks on the fragile economies of those destinations that are reliant on tourism”.
As such, Fallon explained that while the industry, government and destinations should do all they could to increase security, at a certain point the holidaymaker also needed to take responsibility themselves.
“We hope that you [as an industry] do everything possible to reduce risk. But you can’t be expected to claim to have eliminated the risk altogether. There’s a balance of responsibility to be struck.
“Yes you must advise and warn and yes, you should always look at the Foreign Office to improve the degree and nature of warnings that are given. But you can’t ensure that every risk is identified for every country to be 100% safe at all times.
“A few years ago, more than 40 million of our citizens took a holiday and travelled. Last year it was more than 70 million – and part of that responsibility must fall on the travellers themselves. It can’t be right that they escape responsibility from weighing up the risk to families and that they don’t have insurance and things in place if things go wrong.
“They can’t be expected to scream at FCO staff or run to ambulance chasing lawyers. We live in a dangerous world but most of us want to voyage into it.”
Fallon added that the challenges presented by terrorism were “not going to ease”.
“They are going to get harder. And it’s up to all of us to keep working with each other,” he said.
He added that it was “for the [travel] industry to keep working with host countries and cities to mitigate the various risks.
“But it’s incumbent on all of us to keep understanding the risks and to be more aware of them,” he said.
