HAD 354/1
Minute
18
Mr Bughs
Mo Bay (14)
AUS TRAVEL BUDGET:
1.
RA?
315/2
CHEAP AIR FARES
20/10/2
You asked for my comments on Mr Paul's minute of 7 March, attached.
2.
I am not sure what Mr Paul is driving at (and I cannot speak to him because he has taken advantage of his air ticket to go to Hong Kong!) but I think he is suggesting first that Thomas Cook should have provided the two HKD officers with tickets at £708 rather than £1200, and second that even the £708 is more than it need be.
3.
On the first point, the Travel Centre are always happy to quote for, and provide, cheap tickets if they are available, rather than the normal full price tickets. They have a computerised Travel Warehouse based at Peterborough which will quote the cheapest reliable offers available at the time it is consulted. The travel business is so complicated these days that an offer available at any given time may be unavailable literally one hour later. Quotations change hourly as airlines try to sell tickets near the time of departure. Equally, the sale of discount tickets may suddenly cease because the airlines' experience is that they can rely on the remaining tickets to be filled by passengers paying the full fare.
4. The £708 ticket offered to Mr Paul may well therefore not have been available when Mr Sainty and Mr Furness booked their tickets. There is another complication which is that cheap tickets often have conditions attached (Mr Paul refers to one of them in his minute) which officers are unwilling or unable to accept. We are in the process of encouraging AUSS to persuade their Departments to accept cheap tickets with conditions attached where these can be met: this is obviously a good way to save money, but many Departments have proved resistant to it.
5.
As to Mr Paul's second point, Thomas Cook do not have bucket shop prices because they are not a bucket shop. As everyone knows there can be serious risks in buying tickets from such places: the company may fold without issuing the ticket, it may fail to deliver the goods, the ticket may prove to be invalid, or it may turn out to be part of a group ticket issue, which would be dishonoured if, without any warning to the customer, other members of the group changed their plans. The FCO do not ask Thomas Cook to compete with this sort of service, for obvious reasons.
13 March 1991
Roju sunt
R G Short
Personnel Services Department
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