Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and I'm delighted

once again to be joined by Charlotte Hindle, who has your questions on a thorny travel topic. Today,

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?

Charlotte, what would you like to know on the basis of what readers and listeners have asked you?

Well, I think really it's exactly, as you said, there are lots of organisations within travel and just people don't seem to know who they are, what they stand for, what they mean, and indeed what they do.

So could we just start off just with one of them? Can we start off with Abta? And the first thing I want to know is what does it stand for? Well, that's a very

good question, and it used to stand for the Association of British Travel Agents. It was set up

only over 70 years ago, when package travel was pretty much in its infancy, and when pretty much

everybody booked through their high street

travel agent. So to have a trade association was a really good idea. Given the fragility of

holiday bookings, particularly in the kind of second half of the 20th century, it made sense to have a trade body

that would also provide some consumer cover and also guarantee quality. It's since gone from

Abta, standing for the Association of British Travel Agents, to Abta the Travel Association.

And that really represents the idea that it's a wider body with an awful lot of

representation of the tour operators.

And tour operators are simply holiday companies.

So people like EasyJet holidays, like Tu-E, like Jet 2 holidays.

So is it an organisation for the industry,

or is it an association for the travelling public? Well, it used to be more consumer-focused than it is now.

However, it is still pretty consumer-focused. Let's go back to its original job of regulating travel agents.

And there is a very good, strong code of conduct. So if you go into your high street travel agent,

...