Following the Government?s announcement of a new Global Travel Taskforce, ABTA and The Advantage Travel Partnership have released a statement.
Mark Tanzer, chief executive of ABTA ? The Travel Association, said: ?The creation of the Global Travel Taskforce shows a recognition from Government of the need to get people travelling again to support the travel industry, which has been hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis.
?The taskforce needs to focus on decisive and urgent action, not only on rapidly introducing a testing regime, but also on moving to a regionalised quarantine approach and lifting the global advisory against travel - returning to providing travel advice for individual countries based on the risk to a traveller in destination."
?Other countries have already moved to introduce testing, and further delays will only serve to exacerbate the industry?s struggles ? especially as the winter season is fast approaching. With furlough ending this month, and the new Job Support Scheme doing little to support travel businesses, without tailored support we?ll see more job losses and businesses folding.?
Travel consortium, The Advantage Travel Partnership which represents the largest proportion of independent travel agents in the UK, has provided the below comment in response to the government?s announcement regarding the creation of a Global Travel Taskforce.
CEO, Advantage Travel Partnership, Julia Lo Bue-Said, said: ?We are now seven months into a pandemic with a government that appears to have no thought-out strategy or concrete timescale on testing for travellers which is creating confusion and frankly utter chaos. 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."
"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 90k 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.?
