Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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We have all met many travel agents. They are in a particularly precarious scenario and I suppose it is because they are at the front line. It is like working in a bank during the previous economic downturn when the teller got the blame. Similarly, people are asking travel agents why they are not refunding money because that is who the consumer sees. I get the challenges.

Our guests mentioned that the worst offender for not paying back money is Ryanair. Are any other airlines doing that?

I want to deal specifically with an example that came to me from a travel agent who dealt in an awful lot of group bookings. He would buy flights at different prices in different batches. Some of them were for school kids in school group holiday scenarios and that created a difficulty because there could be a large disparity between the prices and the problem was how to separate it out. Our guests are probably aware of travel agents who, particularly early in the pandemic, paid back the consumer straight away, anticipating a quick payback from the airline, which obviously was not forthcoming.

We need to give our guests the clarity around the supports, which needs to happen straight away, and address the scenario around the package travel directive. Regarding some of the excuses used earlier by Ryanair, such as the letter of the law and paying directly back to the consumer, a number of these travel agents will also have been accused during this period of having been screen scrapers. Will our witnesses deal with that point, please?