The Business Travel Association’s 2021 conference got
underway in Liverpool on Monday with a plea from its chairperson to focus on
community – rather than competition – in order to “emerge stronger and more
agile than ever”.
Suzanne Horner, BTA chairwoman and chief executive of Gray
Dawes Travel, opened proceedings with a warning that “we are not out of the
woods yet” and urged TMC members and suppliers to work together for the greater
good of the industry.
“While we are all competitors, we are also colleagues and we
carry the weight of rebuilding our industry,” she told delegates. “But we
cannot do this alone… we need our suppliers and they need us. We must continue
to work together as one. We must continue to work through the challenges and
opportunities that lie ahead of us together and we must continue to recognise
that we need this whole community to work together for us all to come out
stronger on the other side.”
Horner also urged suppliers to be mindful of how new
products, processes and protocols impact TMCs.
“We have businesses that need to recover and we need the
help and support of our suppliers to ensure that we can do that. The traffic
lights are slowly turning green and travel is returning… let’s all ensure that
we all share the positive return as one and that nobody gets ahead by making
life difficult for others.
“Let’s all prepare and plot our recovery, but most
importantly let’s all do this together and emerge stronger and more agile than
ever."
Meanwhile, guest speaker Isabel Hardman, political
journalist and assistant editor of The Spectator, told delegates that travel as
an industry often suffers because few in government come from the sector.
“There’s a real lack of breadth of experience and knowledge within
parliament. Far too many politicians are drawn from the same background,”
she said.
Hardman added that travel was relatively unaffected by Prime
Minister Boris Johnson’s recent cabinet reshuffle, adding that the average
tenure of ministers is 18 months. “It’s not long enough to learn their sector,”
she said.
Discussing the frequent changes to policy around
international travel during the pandemic, Hardman said: “If it seems
incomprehensible from the outside… it doesn’t get any better on the inside.”
She continued: “It’s partly a failure of policy-making in
the government but it’s also a failure of scrutiny in parliament. Covid was an emergency
and a lot of the emergency laws passed by this government have enabled
ministers to make sweeping changed without any input at all… or any questioning
at all from MPs.
“From a certain extent that’s been important, but it’s also
meant ministers have been able to get away with very woolly policy decision
making. They haven’t had MPs saying to them ‘why are you doing this’. That is
one of the beauties of parliament when it’s working well… but we haven’t had
that for the past year and a half.”