While the announcement of a new Global Travel Taskforce is a step in the right direction, it does not alleviate the financial strain and frustration placed on the travel sector at this moment in time, and we need assistance now.
The travel industry has been immobilised, we are a key economic driver for so many businesses across so many sectors.
We employ hundreds of thousands of people and create huge amounts of tax revenue for the government and yet to date, have been totally side-lined.
Today [Wednesday 7 October] we saw Air Canada trial testing 13,000 travellers on arrival, and then again after seven and 14 days and 98% showed negative results.
We welcome forward thinking businesses like this and question why the UK government isn’t thinking along these lines to give our travel industry the tools we need to survive.
It seems as though this government is hell-bent on keeping the industry on the naughty step, with a complete lack of comprehension on how the industry can survive this crisis.
Without help or a clear path to recovery, this will cost the UK economy more than £60 billion in leisure and inbound activity, but more than £220 billion in business travel that relies on aviation, events and meetings.
In my own business, more than 700 small to medium-sized companies who employ close to 10,000 people face financial ruin.
These are businesses that are viable, some are family run companies in local communities up and down the UK that have traded profitably for many years, but when you have not been able to trade at all and have had to refund all the income you have earned – in some cases refunds for bookings made over a year ago – how is any business supposed to survive this?
Every business plans for low periods, but I would like to know how the government expects "viable" businesses to trade on zero income to date and zero continued support for any length of time.
This is not about taking a holiday during a pandemic, it’s about ensuring there are appropriate measures to support an industry when the government has created an impossible trading environment.
The new Job Support Scheme does not benefit an industry that is unable to trade and will leave to even more redundancies across our entire eco-system expected to be in the region of 90,000 jobs.
The future looks bleak: there is a tidal wave of business failures coming our way and further heartache about to hit our industry as a tsunami of redundancies approaches.
Julia Lo Bue-Said is chief executive of the Advantage Travel Partnership.
