The Association of British Travel Agents (Abta) demanded that all the plane tickets should be subject to a levy to fund the repatriation of passengers after an airline collapses.
Mark Tanzer, the chief executive of the organization said that the collapse of Monarch shows that consumer protection in travel is not understood and there’s a gaping hole at its centre.
In the early hours of 2 October, Monarch went into administration stating the terrorism in Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt for its demise which took away the job of almost 2,000 people. Following this, the government announced that all the 110,000 passengers who had tickets till 15th October can claim their tickets free of charge.
Mr Tanzer told Abta’s convention in the Azores that the association was not consulted about the airlift. He called the exercise “completely unsatisfactory”, and said: “It sets a precedent for next time there’s an airline failure. He continued saying that either the Government sticks to the principle ‘you’re unprotected, you’re on your own’ or it adopts the principle that everyone has to be brought back.
The Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling however praised the airline stating that there would have been insufficient capacity in the commercial aviation market to enable passengers to get home on other airlines. “The danger was that tens of thousands of passengers abroad would have no easy means of returning to the UK.”
Andy McDonald, the Shadow Transport Secretary blamed the airline for the collapse and called it a ‘total lack of certainty’. Mr Grayling responded: “This airline did not fail because of Brexit; this airline failed because it had a business model that was not capable of dealing with a price war in the Mediterranean.”
