Travel Industry stalwart and high profile South Australian Phil Hoffmann has told Federal Tourism Minister the Hon Dan Tehan and Finance Minister Senator the Hon Simon Birmingham that financial support for the sector “must be ongoing.”
Mr Hoffmann met with the Ministers yesterday along with other key travel industry leaders in Adelaide as part of a local Travel Industry Round Table hosted by News Corp’s The Adelaide Advertiser.
At the event, Mr Hoffman told both Mr Tehan and Senator Bimingham that the unique circumstances of Australia’s outbound travel sector alongside the reality that there is a significant lag in revenue flow to travel agents after the booking is made means ongoing support is a must.
“While it’s fantastic that international travel in and out of Australia is starting up again, it’s going to be many months before we see pre-COVID patterns. There is a 6-9 month lag in revenue from time of payment through to final payment to the travel business so we are in for a long hard 2022.”
“This is the fourth year of financial impact for Australia’s travel businesses. The Omicron variant meant terrible trading conditions in December and January and while there’s been a slight uptick in bookings since the relaxation of international borders, it’s going to take time for travel to get back to where it was.”
“On top of the international travel ban, the suspension of cruise and the stop-start domestic border situation, we are effectively entering our fourth year of significant business impact. We had to refund almost half our revenue in 2019 for travel that couldn’t be undertaken in 2020. We have had a hard lockdown of 700+ days as a result of Australians not being able to travel internationally, further aggravated by the various domestic border closures.”
“We had to let valuable members of the team go and in fact have had to say goodbye to more than half of our valuable travel professionals. These skills will be very difficult to replace without the ongoing support we are looking to the Federal Government for.”
“Our clients need our skills and support more than ever. We appreciated the Federal Government’s support via the Consumer Travel Support Program however the support, while welcome, unfortunately, was not as aligned as it should have been to the operating costs and structures of the larger travel agencies and those with multi-outlets.”
“We need the ban on cruise to be lifted so that ships can start returning to Australian waters and we need ongoing support while we recover so that we have the support we need to keep supporting travelling Australians.”
“We also respectfully request the immediate release of the funds remaining from the first two rounds of the Consumer Travel Support Program fund on a fair and equitable basis as per the proposed tiers.”
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