The announcement in February that the Institute of Travel Management for the UK and Ireland (ITM) and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) planned to merge came as a surprise to many in the industry.
On the face of it, it looked a sound idea. Many of ITM's 1200 members, comprising both buyers and suppliers, were also ACTE members as well. With many common aims and objectives, a merger seemed common sense.
But there were doubts from the start, notably from organisations like Paragon which represents buyers. These pointed out that the specific interests of the travel managers and procurement staff were not always the same as the agents let alone the suppliers and that they might be lost or minimised in a larger organisation which represented all parties.
Other bodies representing buyers, notably the Belgian Association of Travel Managers, made it absolutely clear they would not follow ITM's path.
But this it seems is not why the merger talks foundered. There were two strands to this. The first was a feeling by the British and Irish that they would lose too much of their identity in becoming the UK and Ireland wing of ACTE.
The second was that ACTE itself began to doubt the wisdom of hiving the UK and Ireland off from its EMEA region and thereby reducing that organisation's claims to speak for the European region.
ACTE president Greeley Koch said the talks had begun before the merger announcement in February and “we really found there were so many similarities behind what we wanted to accomplish and what we wanted to do for our members.”
But it was in this atmosphere of optimism that the doubts began to set it. “A couple of things that we got hung up on in the end had to do with the regional structure that we normally have and what we had been saying about that we would create a fifth region.
“The more we started to look at it we asked ‘does it make sense for us to carve that out given the things that are happening across the European Union?'. We need to represent ourselves to the EC with one voice.
“So given that the EC is coming together, we did not want to take the opposite approach and split off the UK and Ireland,” Mr Koch said.
Faced with the prospect of not having its own ACTE region, ITM also began to have doubts, apparently fearing that its local needs might get overlooked in the larger EMEA grouping. In a word, they felt they would lose their local identity.
One area of concern was that ITM could probably not go on printing its own newsletter, Newsline and its other publications.
ACTE naturally rejects the charge that it does not represent local needs, pointing out that its forums in the region are held in all major countries and address both local and industry-wide issues.
There was also the growing realisation that a merger was not actually essential. Apart from the local issues, Mr Koch said that he and Tom Stone, chairman of ITM, calculated that they could achieve 90% of their aims through a partnership rather than a formal merger.
Among these joint objective issues are IATA reform, traveller security, passports and visas.
“Our viewpoint was that there are issues in the UK that need to be addressed. But when you look at travel issues, you can't really address them through individual countries. You need to address them as a region,” Mr Koch said.