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Stakeholders Berate Nigerian Govt Over Non-Protection Of Travel Agencies

Bankole Bernard, President of the National Association of Nigerian Travel Agencies (NANTA), lamented that absence of local laws have led to the death of several travel agents in the country.

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Stakeholders in the travel industry on Thursday have criticised the Nigerian government over the absence of local content laws to protect travel agencies in the country.

The stakeholders warned that if the activities of infiltrators were not nipped in the bud, travel agents businesses in the country may collapse in the next few years.

Bankole Bernard, President of the National Association of Nigerian Travel Agencies (NANTA), in his presentation on Thursday at a breakfast meeting organised by the Aviation Round Table (ART), lamented that absence of local laws have led to the death of several travel agents in the country.

Bernard insisted that there was no local content law to protect and preserve the downstream sector for citizens of the country, adding that there should be a way of tracking sales of tickets in the country so that data from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), National Bureau of Statistics and the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) could be relied upon and verified.

He listed some of the challenges facing travel agencies’ businesses in Nigeria to include poor regulation/neglect of the regulation of the activities of the Global Distribution System (GDS) and abuse of the airline inventories.

He said the travel agencies were constrained by the fact that the International Air Transport Association (IATA) dictates the tune of the business from international perspective without recourse to the rules and regulations of Nigeria.

NANTA president also mentioned the lack of a national carrier for a full representation of the country on the global conference, as one of the factors militating against the growth of travel agents in Nigeria.

Other challenges, according to him, were poor business etiquette of the corporate travellers keeping to covenanted agreement then switching to another agency for business, lack of enabling environment to the growth of the  downstream sector of  the aviation industry, proper regulation of the industry through local rules, creation of a data bank to keep record of  activities, policies that protect consumers, and  local content law to protect, and lack of regular stakeholders meeting on issues affecting the industry.

In his remarks, Elder Gbenga Olowo, the ART President, decried the declining of air bookings by Nigerian agencies, stating that the airlines do not give priority to travel agencies.

Olowo noted that this has led many of them to start selling non-air tickets like hotels, destinations and others.

Also, Alhaji Muneer Bankole, Managing Director of Med-View Airlines and chairman of the event, said the local airlines were dying because of multiple charges from government agencies.

Noting that the indigenous carriers needed protection from the government, he urged the travel agencies to form an alliance to strengthen their business, stressing that with this, their collapse would be curbed.

He further called on the government to bring down the price of the dollar to help the aviation industry.

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