Banks ruin livelihoods; far worse than air accidents, says PATA CEO
An international travel expert last week asserted that banks were worse off killing people’s livelihoods in paying off fines than airline crashes that lose lives.
The global travel industry does far more to help humanity than hinder whereas the banking sector hinders humanity for the gain of an extremely small percentage of people who fundamentally begin the system laundering money, stressed Martin J Craigs, CEO Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) at the PATA Sri Lanka Chapter AGM in Colombo last week.
When Mr. Craigs was questioned how air travel would become safe after so many accidents and incidents within the course of the year, he told the Business Times “Everyday we hear banks pay millions and billions of dollars of fines. Of course they fight those cases or else they are the ones who would lose. Whose money are they using to pay the fine? Why do investment bankers have to be paid 20 to 30 times more than anyone else? When they make a mess they kill peoples’ livelihoods for which they don’t, suffer at all.”
He noted that in the 21st century, airlines were the electricity of the world’s economy and that if ‘you’ switch it off nothing works.
The industry needs to promote itself externally to remind the typical politicians that this is an extremely difficult industry to make a reasonable profit. Therefore it shouldn’t be unnecessarily taxed which is linked to the point where risk and reward should be more fairly allocated, he explained.
Speaking on the tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka by 2016, Mr. Craigs emphasised that hotels and airlines make reasonable profit since they have taken huge risks. The target of achieving 2.5 million tourists by 2016 is quite realistic because of the outbound demand. All studies are very optimistic about the outbound demand.
Sri Lanka like every other country is after the same business. The discriminating tourists want authentic experiences. Some countries have a 100 metre long beach in the middle of a shopping mall because they can’t go to the beach, get clean air, so they have to artificially create a beach inside a shopping mall. If they could spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build an artificial beach, surely they would love to visit Sri Lanka.
Asia’s forecast of growth is faster than any other region in the world. Take the huge growth numbers and looking at the number of airplanes required to move that number of people, there will be a massive increase in aircraft which then requires more pilots as well. There will be 198,000 pilots and 11,000 planes by 2030. In Asia Pacific, PATA will have the largest market share from, to and within by 2020, noted Mr. Craigs.