Australians have cancelled holidays worth about $10 billion – and hard-pressed travel agents are reaping praise for clawing back clients’ money from hotels, tour operators and airlines, whereas travellers who booked online are making endless phone calls and getting nowhere.
A story published by ABC News online yesterday carried the headline: Australians have cancelled holidays worth an estimated $10 billion, leaving travel agents decimated.
The ABC looked at a family from Western Australia who booked a five-week holiday, flying business class, with an itinerary including Croatia, Italy and the Greek islands, culminating in the wedding of friends in London. The total cost was about $35,000.
By a “sheer stroke of luck”, their travel insurance policy covered pandemics, and their travel agent, Christine Ross at Attadale Travel in suburban Perth, has been working hard since to get their hotel and flight costs refunded.
The father of the family told the ABC: “We’re still confident that we are going to get that money back, but I daresay if it weren’t for somebody in the travel industry batting for us, then we’d just have to smile and move on.”
Not everyone would manage to smile.
The family’s situation stands in stark contrast to the plight of another would-be traveller, a woman who booked return flights with Qatar Airways to the Czech Republic “via a popular online website”.
That client is now desperately trying to get refunds, having spent hours on the phone before coming across an online form and filling it in.
Her verdict: “You just don’t hear back from them.”
The ABC quotes Australian Federation of Travel Agents (AFTA) chair Tom Manwaring, who estimates at least $10 billion was spent on holidays that were not able to be taken.
Manwaring said travel agents were dealing with millions of cancelled bookings, from airfares to hotels, tours and rental car hire, and it could take up to 12 months before the process was completed.
MEANWHILE, the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the travel industry – in Australia and beyond – is gaining increasing attention. For the emerging Australian situation, see: First signs of ‘current and future employment carnage’
A report by the Bloomberg news service, published yesterday, went further. Damage already inflicted on the industry in the US includes eight million jobs lost so far. The Bloomberg article says: “The monthly US employment report on Friday made clear that many of those jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon – if ever.” See: Scars Inflicted on Travel Are Looking Permanent
Even in New Zealand (which has eliminated Covid-19 and which yesterday hailed the 100th day since it last had active community transmission) the impact on the travel industry, and therefore on the economy, is severe. Tourism was New Zealand’s biggest export industry, contributing over 20% of the country’s total exports.
It’s worth remembering the awesome economic power of tourism, pre-Covid-19.
In Australia:
- In the financial year 2018-19, Australia generated A$60.8 billion in direct tourism gross domestic product (GDP).
- Tourism directly employed 666,000 Australians making up 5% of Australia’s workforce.
- Tourism was Australia’s fourth largest exporting industry, accounting for 8.2% of Australia’s exports earnings.
- Australia was in 2018-19 one of the highest yielding destinations in the world, with international visitors spending A$44.6 billion in 2018-19 compared to the previous year, a growth of 5%.
In New Zealand:
- Total annual tourism expenditure for the year ended March 2019 was NZ$40.9 billion – NZ$112 million per day.
- Annual international tourism expenditure is NZ$17.2 billion – NZ$47 million per day.
- Annual domestic tourism expenditure is NZ$23.7 billion – NZ$65 million per day.
- Total annual tourism expenditure has increased by NZ$13.8 billion, or 50%, in the past six years.
- Tourism is New Zealand’s biggest export industry, contributing 20.4% of total exports.
- Tourism generates a direct annual contribution to GDP of NZ$16.2 billion, or 5.8%, and a further indirect contribution of NZ$11.2 billion, another 4% of New Zealand’s total GDP.
- 229,566 people are directly and another 163,713 indirectly employed in tourism in New Zealand – 14.4% of the total number of people employed in New Zealand.
- The annual GST paid by tourists is NZ$3.8 billion, including NZ$1.8 billion collected from international visitors.
Written by Peter Needham
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It’s disappointing to still be hearing the old line over and over again that if you book with an agent you’ll be looked after, whereas ‘if you book online you’re on your own’.
For one, they’re all travel agents whether it’s those that work for offline or online travel agencies, and they are all human. One set has a physical store, the other has an online store.
Adding to that, from both my personal experience and what keeps being reported there are good online agencies that will fight for their customers tooth and nail, while there are terrible ones that simply do not care about their customers. Well, customers vote with their dollars and those agencies do not survive for very long.
But guess what? It is in no way different with offline agencies. Some are great, while some treat their customers like dirt. How often do we read in the news about travel agents swindling their clients money?
While this may be on the extreme end of the spectrum, I guess my message is that the wording of this article, like many others before it pushing that ‘without a travel agent you’re on your own’, is truly biased and does not reflect the diversity of agents on both sides of the fence.