Over the last 12 months, (30 April 2014 -1 May 2015), thousands of individuals from ABTA Members have benefited from the wide range of services on offer from ABTA and its Partners. Helplines, guidance notes, the ABTA/ATOL scheme and assistance to Members’ customers all saw significant traffic as ABTA helped steer its Members through changes to ATOL requirements, VAT issues, updates to air passenger rights and a whole host of other complex issues.
Helplines
The last year has seen significant changes to laws around holiday pay and various VAT changes. ABTA Partners who are leaders in their various fields helped many ABTA Members adapt to these changes via dedicated helplines. These helplines are available free of charge during normal office hours and provide expert advice on topics such as tax, employment law and crisis management. In May 2014 three new helplines were introduced: investments expansion and sales advice, managing risk, and HR, training and recruitment. Using the helplines can offer considerable savings for Members in avoiding professional fees.
Guidance notes
There are over 50 guidance notes on abta.com covering various legal, commercial and legislative issues where it is essential that Members understand their obligations and responsibilities. Over the year these notes were accessed 2,368 times by ABTA Members.
ABTA/ATOL
175 ABTA Members took advantage of the ABTA/ATOL Joint Administration Scheme over the past twelve months, up from 116 when the scheme was first launched. ABTA does not pass any administration costs onto Members and so is able to deliver significant cost savings versus applying for a licence via other routes.
Supporting Members’ customers
The ABTA Customer Support department handled over 11,275 cases and 16,000 telephone enquiries helping consumers to resolve disputes with Members in a cost effective way for both parties. Most of these were resolved with support from ABTA, with only 349 customers choosing to pursue the complaint through the ABTA arbitration service.
ABTA in the news
ABTA knows how important the ABTA logo is to Members and over the course of the year the ABTA Communications team conducted 592 radio and TV interviews on a wide range of issues, strengthening ABTA’s reputation as the go-to voice of the industry and raising awareness of the brand.
Mark Tanzer ABTA Chief Executive said: “I’m really pleased to see that so many ABTA Members and their staff took advantage of the multitude of services available to our Members over the last twelve months. We take great pride in supporting our Members and helping them through regulatory changes and travel crises as well as providing day to day business support. I’d encourage all Members to regularly check the Member zone of our website to ensure they are maximising the value of their membership by accessing this consultancy and advice. With further changes to ATOL and the revised Package Travel Directive on the horizon never has there been a greater need amongst our Members for clear and cohesive advice and support.”
