As our Director of Public Affairs, Luke Petherbridge, explains in his article in Travel Weekly this week, a significant policy issue currently on the Government and industry’s agenda is the review of the Package Travel Regulations, and it’s a focus of ABTA’s work right now.

So that the Government understands the views of our members on this issue, we are giving you the opportunity to speak directly with the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) at our Package Travel Regulations workshops, which are running over the next few months.

The first of these took place at ABTA’s member engagement event in London this week. There we debated issues such as taking UK and lower cost holidays, including school trips, out of protection; the requirement to pay refunds within 14 days; the right of redress for organisers against their suppliers; and whether business travellers should be protected under the Regulations.

We have four more workshops with the Department for Business in the pipeline; you can sign up to join here (ABTA Package Travel Regulations Roadshow | ABTA). Members will have also received a survey to provide feedback to ABTA to inform our response to the consultation. 

Our engagement with Government departments extends beyond the DBT; we’re also in regular conversation with the Department for Transport, among many others. The impact on travel agents and tour operators of the outage of the Air Traffic Control system across the August bank holiday has been among the issues we’ve raised recently. Yesterday the Transport Select Committee met in Parliament to examine what happened and the impact on customers and industry. We wrote to the Committee ahead of the hearing to emphasise that any review into the causes of the failure should extend beyond the impacts on airlines and airports and include consideration of the knock-on effects on businesses further down the supply chain, including tour operators and travel agents. 

You can read more here. We’ll be following directly with the CAA and Aviation Minister. 

Mark Tanzer, Chief Executive