BREXIT
The fog of uncertainty
How will Brexit impact the travel industry? BBT peers into a future in which even the basics are unknown
ByBOB PAPWORTH D
EVOTEES OF THE SEEMINGLY- ENDLESS QI re-runs on Dave will be aware that there are some questions to which the answer is ‘nobody knows’. The
first panellist to raise his or her question- mark paddle is awarded an unknown number of points under a scoring system which nobody understands. Fully nine months after the UK
electorate voted to leave the European Union, prime minister Theresa May finally decreed that March 29 2017 should be D-Day – the ‘D’ for ‘departure’ – and thus began the process of extricating the country, after 44 years, from the politico- economic partnership. Then, just as BBT thought it was safe to
go to press, the prime minister decided to throw another spanner in the works by calling a general election. The impact of this? At time of writing, ‘nobody knows’... Theresa May’s mandate to hand in the
UK’s resignation is only the beginning of the beginning: the other 27 EU members now have to agree on a common approach to Brexit – currently France wants punitive measures, Germany is taking a middle line, while the likes of Malta and Estonia presumably couldn’t care either way. No EU-wide accord is expected before
the summer break (if then), and then no serious business is expected to be conducted before September. The UK’s window of negotiating opportunity is reduced to just 18 months. From a corporate travel perspective, that potentially constitutes another year-and- a-half of uncertainty.
110 BBT May/June 2017
BUSINESS AS USUAL? Are we bothered? Apparently not. As Nigel Turner, Carlson Wagonlit Travel’s recently retired senior director of programme management, puts it: “Concerns following the referendum result turned out to be unfounded. The world hasn’t collapsed.” Adam Knights, ATPI Group’s
UK managing director, says: “If the negotiations are difficult and fraught, people might start to think differently, but for the time being companies are just getting on with business as usual. I don’t think triggering Article 50 will change anything – it’s what comes later that matters.
“I’m not convinced we are going to see a huge Brexit impact anyway –at least not yet”
“I watch our travel turnover, and it
kind of matches the stock market and the economy generally, so if I take our overall business, it’s up – not a great deal, but definitely up – so it would seem there is no Brexit effect at the moment. “The type of clients that we as a travel
management company deal with tend not to do lots and lots of European travel – they tend to book that for themselves, because there is not a lot of value that a TMC can create if you’re just going
backwards and forwards to Amsterdam. TMCs come into their own when there is a bigger global requirement. “I’m not convinced we are going to see
a huge Brexit impact anyway – at least not yet. I think we all thought that when it [the referendum result] was announced, but it didn’t happen.” It’s those two little words “not yet”
that are key to the whole Brexit debate. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the corporate travel community’s prime concern centres, unsurprisingly, on individuals’ freedom of movement. Trade barriers and tariffs matter, of
course, but trade will inevitably continue. According to HM Revenue & Customs, the UK bought £19.5 billions’ worth of goods from other EU members in January alone, and that figure does not include services. Of that total, imports of goods from Germany amounted to £5.1 billion. It seems unlikely that Angela Merkel
will want to become embroiled in a tit-for-tat trade war that might imperil that revenue stream, not least because Germany goes to the polls on September 24 this year and she will want to hang on to her job.
PROVIDING HOSPITALITY Freedom of movement between the UK and the EU is an altogether thornier issue. At one level, UK citizens will eventually need new passports. We could be denied access to the (relatively) fast-track immigration channels at airports. Even in the worst-case scenario, in
which UK travellers could be required to apply for visas to travel to EU member
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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