With so many unknowns across the travel industry, holidaymakers are turning to agents to help them find the answers?
I think it?s pretty fair to say that Air Travel is going through some rather challenging times at the moment.
The recent fatal crash of flight ET302 highlighted similarities to that of the Lion Air crash which had happened only a few months earlier. With a combined death toll of 344 passengers and crew, this quite rightly received a lot of coverage from media outlets throughout the world. As have the subsequent decisions made by many airlines and countries to ground nearly all of the Boeing 737 MAX 8, which was the plane model involved in both incidents, whilst a full investigation is carried out. This has inevitably led to a flurry of news articles, blogs and social media posts questioning the safety of all aircraft.
Couple that with the uncertainty of Brexit [don?t get me started] and it leads to many passengers having a plethora of queries - which we as travel professionals, are expected to answer. That?s not necessarily an easy thing to do, especially when the questions are ones to which nobody knows the answers! Yet it?s our knowledge and comforting words that can reassure the customer and help secure that booking.
For me personally, one of the most encouraging things to see is that when it comes to air safety, there is no messing about. The ?powers that be? have acted fast to protect air travellers by grounding aircraft on the chance that the latest crash was more than an unfortunate coincidence. Although this has caused some disruption both to airlines and their passengers throughout the world, the fact that safety is being put ahead of profit is a relief and quite frankly not something that many other industries can boast.
As for Brexit though, who knows. I think all that we can do right now is carry on doing what we?re doing, keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. Once it has all been sorted, whatever happens, one thing is for certain: the UK is going to need a holiday!
