THIS opinion piece was sent in by a very concerned Travel Daily reader from an agency, which until this week was a loyal AFTA member – and who wishes to remain anonymous .
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Perhaps AFTA should be renamed to AFTBGCC — Australian Federation of Travel Buying Groups, Consortia and Consolidators?
Who and what do they really represent?
How is it that within the space of about a month, Webjet became an AFTA member, ATAS accredited AND managed to get a vacant seat on the AFTA board of directors?
Why did AFTA dismiss CATO’s discussion paper known as “ATAS & Consumer Protection Reform Proposal” seemingly out of hand? — [the paper] seems like a whole load of common sense to me!
Did the recent AFTA board re-election take place without the scrutiny of its real members — us “traditional” travel agents or did I just not receive my voting paper?
Travel Daily tells us that “votes were received from 848 of the total 1050 votes available under the AFTA constitution” and reading the next couple of sentences in that article it is apparent that more than 800 votes went to each of the incumbent board members.
Who did the voting on our behalf?
All this has taken place during the worst period in the history of our industry — at a time when each of us is pre-occupied with our own survival in one shape, form or another and wanting to come out intact on the other side — oh yes, and still dealing with refunds!
You could hardly say that the AFTA board has been transparent with us — its so called “members” — there has been no consultation with us and the first we are hearing about these incredibly important issues is via Travel Daily!
What else haven’t we been told? Our guess is we’ll just have to keep reading Travel Daily to find out!
For AFTA’s National Mobilisation program — and government support — we are truly grateful as this will help us get through the short-term but we really do now need to focus on the future and to do that we need an AFTA that is truly representative of all of us travel agents AND as part of the much larger ecosystem called the travel industry.
We do now need the various silos of our industry to come together and we do need transparency from those that say they represent OUR business interests.
My gut feeling is the AFTA board is representing the business interests of the organisations they individually represent and this no longer includes us.
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Source: traveldaily