The travel industry is “still a little bit unprepared” for dealing with sudden events, consultant Chris Reynolds told the ITM annual conference today (April 7).
“We are not preparing for the unexpected in the way we should be, he told a session on Planning: Moving People at the event at Heythrop Park, Oxfordshire.
Reynolds, senior partner in 3Sixty Global and a former travel manager for Siemens, said the industry had been completely found out when ash from the Icelandic volcano had shut down European airspace for weeks last year.
“We thought we had traveller tracking in place. But we did not have traveller’s telephone numbers in their profiles, their e-mail addresses in their profiles. People started making their own decision and we lost visibility of these people. We did not know where they were. We had lost control,” he said.
Reynolds said there was now political unrest in the Middle East which needed to be watched to see where it was possible to travel and to be ready to advise travellers at the point of booking.
He asked delegates: “So what procedures do you have in place?”
He said the industry had seen big changes in attitudes and practices for traveller safety and security in the last ten to 15 years but there was still some way to go.
Later he warned delegates of the difficulties which had arisen by the increased unbundling of services by airlines.
He said many self booking tools could not deal with these extras on the cost of a flight. What used to be simple a few years ago was not much more complex.
A self booking tool which could deal with unbundling was not yet available, Reynolds said.
He said technology providers were researching the problem but he added he was “not sure” what TMCs were doing about the issue.
“It will have to be a tri-partite solution involving the technology people, the TMCs and the corporates," Reynolds said.