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Eventia Welcomes New Provisions in Aviation Bill

The Aviation Bill passed its second reading without a vote in the House of Commons on Monday.

The Minister announced earlier that the Bill would include a provision which would enable the government, at a future date, to extend the ATOL licensing regime to include both packages sold by airlines and sales as agent of the consumer. This could happen after a future consultation process, yet to be announced. 

Chairman of Eventia Regulation Committee Brian Kirsch, comments: “Eventia has long argued that it is wrong that event management agencies are required to provide financial protection to their much larger corporate customers, and so B2B transactions with larger companies should be outside ATOL. Failing this, we believe there should, be a level playing field between different package providers, so we will welcome a review which looks at the case to include airlines in ATOL protection. However, extending the ATOL scheme to include B2B sales as agent would be a step too far, and a blow to agencies who are still reeling from changes to the TOMS regime which has encouraged them to adopt the agent of customer model.”