AGENTS are being urged to think twice about using suppliers that have either lost accreditation or left the Australian Federation of Travel Agents’ (AFTA) Travel Accreditation Scheme (ATAS).
Speaking at the Travellers Choice Conference in Adelaide this month, AFTA CEO Jayson Westbury said the organisation could not always spell out the exact reasons businesses were being removed from the scheme, but stressed decisions were not taken lightly.
“When you’re running a scheme like this, we take it really seriously and you’ve got to start seeing the value of this scheme that you own – it’s there for you,” he said.
“When we say something about a supplier, we really mean it, and when someone’s kicked out it’s for a reason – we know stuff [but] the law is such that we can’t tell you specifically.”
Westbury said agents needed to take AFTA’s removal of suppliers from ATAS as a red flag.
“I am surprised that the message doesn’t seem to have completely resonated with the agency community,” he said.
“We did kick Tempo [Holidays] out about a month before they went down and people still booked.
“We don’t kick people out for fun,” he said.
“We take a lot of time, we’ve been to the Supreme Court over kicking one mob out and then 18 months later they went broke.”
Speaking with Travel Daily, Westbury said as the administrator of the ATAS scheme AFTA had access to Tempo’s books up until a month before the business entered voluntary administration and ultimately liquidation (TD 20 Sep).
“We knew all the details,” Westbury said.
“They were telling us stories [and] we didn’t believe them.
“We’ve started talking to the liquidator saying ‘you should look into this’, and I think he will, and I just hope justice is served.
“As far as I’m concerned someone should go to jail, because that’s the only way we can get justice, because there’s no money apparently.”
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Source: traveldaily