The Chief of Executive of the Association of British Travel Agents, Mark Tanzer, said this morning that British ministers were wrong to tell the public not to book their summer holidays because of the coronavirus.
Tanzer told Travel Weekly: “They are wrong, I don’t think they have a view of when and how the sector is going to open up. So to take a view in January as to what it’s going to be like in May or June is premature.”
He said: “There are a lot of unknowns and it’s too early in January to make a call on whether people should be booking for June, July and August.”
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, Tanzer pointed out: “We’ve seen customers respond very rapidly to these kinds of comments.
“Politicians need to realise when they make these comments it has an immediate impact on booking levels. We’ve made the point to them that these are very injudicious comments.
“We’ve made the point and will continue to make the point that this is not helpful to the sector. They should be not making these kind of comments.”
Tanzer explained to Travel Weekly: “I’m not saying it will be a full summer season, but nobody knows how this is going to pan out, how the vaccine roll-out will go, what we’ll learn about the vaccine from a transmission point of view and so forth.”