Tui's Burling: 'Industry must fight false sickness claims together'

In a Q&A session at the ITT Conference, moderated by TTG Media managing director Daniel Pearce, Burling, who is also Tui’s chief executive Northern Region urged the industry to come together to stamp out the issue.

“This is a situation where claims management companies are tricking and duping customers into making claims when they haven’t had illnesses. Abta has been leading this… But the important thing is that everyone needs to work together on this,” he said.

Burling insisted that Tui would be “looking at the activities of these claims management companies” adding: “We are liaising with all organisations including the City of London police and the Fraud police and we are putting a petition to the justice minister David Lidington from the industry.

“The key thing is that hoteliers will not want to work with the UK market because we are seeing big claims from people. It’s essential that we all work together on this.”

Elsewhere Burling insisted Tui wanted to “reach out” to third party agents. “Our strategy for the UK market in terms of retail distribution is pretty consistent with what we’ve been saying for the last seven years,” he told delegates.

“We do want to reach out to travel agent partners where we can educate them about what we have. We need to do more education with our third party travel agents.

“In certain parts of the country we do have got strong relations,” he added. “There are pockets in the UK where we have good relations with travel agents.

Asked by Pearce whether Tui still wanted total control over its distribution Burling replied: “No, we don’t have any aspirations to change our position. We are supportive of the trade and it’s about understanding is there more that we can do?”

Burling also agreed that the high street had seen a resurgence. “If I looked at a five year plan as a business, we would have said that retail is going to decline. But what we’ve actually seen is that retail is probably more resilient as a business than people would have thought five to 10 years ago.

“Agents use technology, they use training,” he added. “Every year I go back to the floor and shadow one of our top sellers in the UK in our Uxbridge store. And no amount of artificial intelligence will ever develop as good a seller as him. Technology will improve, but it will never get as good as people like that.”

Meanwhile Burling said he wished the specialist brands under the Travelopia banner “well”, after Tui agreed a deal to sell the division earlier this year.

“I think all the specialist brands are fantastic businesses but when we looked at where Tui was going we realised our priorities were different. You start to think, are we the right owners?

“Someone else might be better as they can prioritise them, so we took the view that there are people out there who can take a really good business today and put investment in and make it better. Everyone at Tui wishes them well.”

Burling also said Tui had plans to continue growing, including an expansion of the group’s differentiated hotel offering.

“We’ve got a determination – if you’ve got the best people, the best ideas and the best investments, we will stay on top,” he added. “And if we’re better, then we will be bigger.”