Michelle Baran
This is getting awkward. It used to be that tour operators and airlines liked each other, or they at least pretended to like each other. Then they at least recognized that, like each other or not, they needed each other.
But now, it feels like if tour operators could get customers to their destinations by bus, train or ship, they'd rather opt for that than deal with the airlines and their seemingly endless escalation of fuel surcharges.
"Our air sales are off the charts, which is quite frankly something that we don't particularly want," Trafalgar President Paul Wiseman told Travel Weekly last month. "Air is a completely nonprofit loss, financially subsidized, but we have to do it."
Last week, he added in an email: "The biggest negative impact by far for us is the airline fuel surcharges, which are relentless. The average fuel surcharge on Europe now is $400 per person! Unfortunately that hurts all of us!"
An equally exasperated Marc Kazlauskas, president of Insight Vacations, noted that the company gets airlines fuel surcharge increases "every single day."
The transatlantic capacity crunch has the airlines, which used to reward the passenger volumes that tour operators could promise them with favorable rates, now practically treating tour operators as just another entity trying to get in on limited seats.
Collette Vacations CFO John Galvin said he ran into TravCorp USA President Richard Launder earlier this month, asking him, "How much do you hate fuel?"
"Airlines are definitely increasing fuel surcharges at a fairly healthy clip," Galvin said. "It's definitely of concern to us, and it's increasing the cost of travel."
But what choice do tour operators have? Love the airlines or loathe them, they need them. The problem is that the feeling does not seem to be mutual.
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