AUSTRALIA’S OLDEST AGENCY?

VICTORIA’S Brighton Travelworld is this month celebrating its 45th birthday, with the commemoration including a cocktail party for 200 of their top clients attended by such industry luminaries as Magellan director Kevin Dale and APT founder Geoff Mcgeary. During the speeches it was noted that Brighton Travelworld is reportedly the only travel agency in Australia which has remained in the same location for 45 years. The business is now owned by Keiran Cromie along with Julie Avery - who started there 35 years ago as the bookkeeper before moving into admin, consulting and eventually buying the business with Cromie in 1998. Since then they have doubled the turnover of the agency, which is now part of the Magellan Travel Group. The pair are pictured above at the Magellan conference in Canberra last month where they enthusiastically joined in with the Gatsby theme. with Helloworld abruptly dropping Allianz in October, while Suresave is rolling out a new brand and collateral across its agency network. But the insolvency coverage is much more than a cosmetic change, and what’s more, Allianz Global Assistance has also confirmed that its claims policy “is not to direct customers with these new benefits to their banks to activate chargebacks where their travel agent is the merchant”. Cover-more and Suresave are certain to be closely watching the uptake of the new Allianz insolvency coverage option, which was welcomed by AFTA CEO Jayson Westbury as another example of a market-driven solution to emerge from the reformation of the Australian travel industry. Meanwhile the other hot topic in insurance is Gow Gates’ Travel Agent & Intermediary Failure Insurance (TAIFI) which was one of the options designed for ATAS accredited companies to provide protection for their customers following the demise of the Travel Compensation Fund. By all accounts, TAIFI