The president of the Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association has hit out at “discrimination” against Flybmi customers and reiterated calls for a £1 levy to protect customers in the event of airline failures.
Speaking at the SPAA’s annual dinner in Glasgow, Ken McLeod criticised the Department for Transport (DoT) for the different approaches it took to repatriation following the demise of Monarch in October 2017 and the more recent collapse of regional carrier Flybmi.
“Monarch passengers were repatriated when the government stepped in at a cost of £60 million,” he said. “Flybmi customers weren’t so lucky, there was just a lot less of them. It isn’t right that discrimination should play a part just because you happened to book a flight on a smaller airline.”
The UK government has ordered a review of airline insolvency and is expected to publish a report in a few weeks’ time.
McLeod reiterated calls for a £1 per passenger levy to be ringfenced to protect airline failures, adding: “Had the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the DoT and the government itself listened to the travel industry over a decade ago, when we said a simple £1 per passenger levy on all departures from the UK should apply, then every passenger who ever lost money could have been repatriated or refunded from that fund.”
He also used his speech to urge Holyrood to back calls to scrap the “pretty awful tax” or air passenger duty (APD) – which he said was unfair on Scottish agents.
“Holyrood has the chance to lead the way for the UK, by reducing or scrapping this pretty awful tax,” he said. “There is nothing good about an air departure tax which is recognised as the highest in the world. It just doesn’t make sense. Let’s lead the way, and cut this tax altogether.”
In his speech at the SPAA’s 89th annual dinner, McLeod noted that Glasgow is one of the only major European airports not to have alternative methods of transport to the city centre other than road.
He said the city’s airport needs a rail link, adding: “This subject has been raised in Holyrood as recently as last month. A rail link was mooted a great number of years ago and was dumped in 2009 due to budget cuts.”
But he was upbeat on the number of airline routes served from the three major Scottish airports.
“Air travel from Scotland has grown in an extraordinary way,” he said. “This year we have the arrival in April of an A380 in Emirates colours over the skies of Glasgow, a double daily by Qatar, adding to the 14 million passengers last year that passed through Edinburgh Airport.”
Mcleod also noted Dutch carrier KLM’s addition of five flights a day between Aberdeen and Amsterdam in “SPAA territory”.
But he also used the platform to warn on sustainability, suggesting the trade may need to “reverse things”.
“Perhaps we should be talking about reversibility – trying to ensure things get back to some semblance of their former attraction,” he said when addressing the issue of overtourism.
“With the success of the cruise industry and 20 new ships arriving in the next year, there are obviously huge selling opportunities for agents but we need to think about this carefully.
“We should never try to stop the desire for travel, but we are in danger of destroying the very things that attracted us to go there in the first place.”
He urged the trade to work together to protect destinations and attractions which need to be preserved.
The SPAA is moving towards its 100th year in 2021. The council is made up of 12 council members and Ken Mcleod will step back as president in December, passing the office to vice president Joanne Dooey.