The dust has barely started settling after Boris Johnson’s remarkable election victory when I clasp Abta chief executive Mark Tanzer’s hand by way of greeting.

It’s less than 24 hours since the polls closed but already, Johnson has sought permission to form a new government and stamp his authority on this country’s future – and that means Brexit.

It’s hard to gauge Tanzer’s true feelings on the matter; Brexit is the enigma of our times. “It’s certainly a leap of faith,” offers Tanzer, diplomatically.

We’re in a small office near Abta HQ in London, which Tanzer says has become a part-time call centre since the collapse of Super Break and Thomas Cook. It makes me wonder where to start summing up 2019.

But with the election front of mind and the now very real prospect of a 31 January Brexit, we start with the new political landscape in which we meet.

“What we’ve been against is an abrupt no-deal departure,” Tanzer explains. “The election pretty much eliminates that, at least short-term. We’ve spent a lot of time preparing members and ensuring customers feel confident.

“But it certainly looks like there’s a strong enough majority to exit on 31 January. There would be a transition, which is good for customer confidence and members going into 2020.

"There’s still a lot of work to be done in a year. And there’s a possibility that if that isn’t completed and the PM sticks to his commitment to leave come what may, we could end up with another no-deal scenario.”

So far, the EU has agreed to extend the process, but Tanzer warns this shouldn’t be taken for granted. “Once we get into trade negotiations, every concession counts,” he says. “I hope the EU sees sense, but it’s not certain.”

The Brexit checklist is myriad: aviation; visas; posted workers; reciprocal healthcare; taxation; roaming charges – heaven forbid the Insta-selfie becomes a £1-per-upload casualty of Brexit. “There’s a lot that needs to be done to secure what we’ve already got,” says Tanzer. “And the timeframe is very small.”

He’s also wary of the blind eye government has previously turned to outbound travel versus inbound. “The challenge will be making sure, with every other industry clamouring for priority, that outbound tourism isn’t overlooked,” Tanzer explains.

If Brexit was, as Tanzer puts it, the theme that has run through everything Abta has done in 2019, the failure of Thomas Cook was the jolt that struck at the very heart of the travel sector.

“We were responding within hours,” Tanzer recalls. “We set up a call centre. We held industry calls twice a day with the CAA; this helped steer many companies through those bumpy early days.

“The thing about Thomas Cook was the scale – it had its own agencies selling other people’s products; it had a tour operator so agents were selling its product; the airline; the franchise arrangements; its own suppliers. The shockwave ran through the industry, and it’s had a very wide impact.”

Tanzer believes both the CAA and Abta deserve credit for averting a crisis of consumer confidence arising from Cook’s collapse. “It hasn’t really been a huge story of consumer detriment,” he says. “I was impressed by how quickly the CAA mobilised and got 150,000 people back in two weeks. People were brought home and are getting their money back.”

The Cook situation has, Tanzer says, rightly pushed airline insolvency reform back up the political agenda. “If they [government] are consistently going to repatriate, there should be an arrangement, a fund and mechanisms for doing it as opposed to improvising and leaving the taxpayer to pick up the bill,” he says. “It’s one of the things I hope the new government returns to.”

Days later, the government did, setting out plans to reform airline insolvency, albeit while proposing solutions that could be seen as contradictory to the Atol scheme.

Tanzer says Cook’s failure highlighted the value of package holidays and their viability. “If anything, I think it will consolidate the affection people have for packages,” he tells me. “Over the years, the market has been stable; those 22-24 million packages sold each year have been rock solid.