April 24th - Making sense of travel industry acronyms Abta and Aito
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You're not alone if you don't know what Abta and Aito mean. You might see these acronyms being advertised by travel agents and I'm here to help you understand why they're important, what sort of organisation they are, who they serve, how they can help you as a traveller and what kind of legitimacy they give to a travel agent or tour operator. Charlotte Hindle is here with me asking our reader's questions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and I'm delighted |
| 0:07.5 | once again to be joined by Charlotte Hindle, who has your questions on a thorny travel topic. Today, |
| 0:15.5 | we are trying to make sense of some of the many acronyms of travel, in particular, Abta and Ato. What are they and what aren't they? |
| 0:27.3 | Charlotte, what would you like to know on the basis of what readers and listeners have asked you? |
| 0:33.7 | Well, I think really it's exactly, as you said, there are lots of organisations within travel |
| 0:39.1 | and just people don't seem to know who they are, what they stand for, what they mean, and indeed |
| 0:44.6 | what they do. So could we just start off just with one of them? Can we start off with Abta? |
| 0:51.4 | And the first thing I want to know is what does it stand for? |
| 0:54.7 | Well, that's a very good question, and it used to stand for the Association of British Travel |
| 1:01.2 | Agents. It was set up only over 70 years ago when package travel was pretty much in its infancy, |
| 1:08.9 | and when pretty much everybody booked through their high street |
| 1:14.1 | travel agents. So to have a trade association was a really good idea. Given the fragility of |
| 1:22.0 | holiday bookings, particularly in the kind of second half of the 20th century, it made sense to have a trade body |
| 1:30.2 | that would also provide some consumer cover and also guarantee quality. It's since gone from |
| 1:37.8 | Abta, standing for the Association of British Travel Agents, to Abta the Travel Association. |
| 1:44.9 | And that really represents the idea that it's a wider body with an awful lot of representation of the tour operators. |
| 1:53.3 | And tour operators are simply holiday companies. |
| 1:55.5 | So people like EasyJet holidays, like Tu-E, like Jet 2 holidays. |
| 2:00.3 | So is it an organisation for the industry or is it an |
| 2:05.8 | association for the travelling public? Well it used to be more consumer focus than it is now. However, |
| 2:12.3 | it is still pretty consumer focused. Let's go back to its original job of regulating travel agents. And there is a |
| 2:20.8 | very good, strong code of conduct. So if you go into your high street travel agent, or if you phone |
... |
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