Travel boss to ‘keep outbound high on agenda’ at tourism minister meeting

Lo Bue-Said, who was appointed to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport’s Tourism Industry Council in March, called on the industry to utilise the return of MPs to parliament this week and keep up political lobbying.

A new survey from Advantage’s latest Business Impact Analysis has revealed 56% of the group’s members feel the government “does not understand the travel sector”, while 88% of Advantage agencies think travel is not seen by ministers “as a key economic driver”.

Meanwhile, 64% of respondents said they wanted a minister specifically responsible for outbound tourism within government.

“It’s sad to hear [those statistics] and it’s absolutely not the case that travel isn’t important to the UK economy,” said Lo Bue-Said as she called on the sector to “influence at every level” when it came to engaging with politicians. 

“Fundamentally our sector is very complicated, and I’ve said it before, there’s no such thing as lobbying too much – so we have to make sure we’re influencing from at every level [as MPs return to Westminster] and as we get towards the next general election, that also gives us another opportunity.

“It’s all about timing. There’s lots of different political elements on the agenda right now – and that’s notwithstanding a potential change in government in the near future.

“It’s top of our agenda. What we don’t want to do is be engaging and educating government in the middle of a crisis and that’s what happened [during the Covid pandemic]. We need to make sure as a business sector we are on the top of our game all the time.”

Lo Bue-Said highlighted Advantage’s work alongside Aito to put members in front of their local MPs, with 40 meetings achieved so far.

“A lot of times this is the first time our members have had the chance to speak to their local MPs about their businesses and our sector. That’s a really important part of our engagement, as well as what we’re doing at a national level.”