Weak regulatory intelligence aided 400 foreign illegal travel agencies

More facts have emerged on the proliferation of international travel agencies who are operating without the requisite local licences in Nigeria.

The Director in charge of Air Transport Regulation at the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Group Capt. Edem Oyo-Ita (retd.), had at the Quarterly Business Breakfast Meeting organised by the Aviation Safety Round Table Initiative in Lagos, disclosed that not less than 400 travel agencies operating in the country are not registered by the regulatory agency and do not have the requisite local licences to operate.

According to him, “There were only about 157 travel agencies in the regulator’s registry while over 600 were doing the same business in the country”.

Oyo-Ita further said that “Only about 200 out of the over 600 travel agencies doing business in the country are registered with the National Association of Nigeria Travel Agencies (NANTA), which is a requirement for accreditation by the NCAA.

The NCAA top official was however quick to agree that “We take the blame that we may be poor in our regulations in the downstream sector of aviation which has not been adequately taken care of in the past years but it is mandatory that all travel agencies must be registered with the NCAA and NANTA.

“The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has about 600 travel agents; NANTA has 200 members while NCAA has only 157 registered members in our record. This gathering is a wakeup call for every travel agent operating in the industry to register with the NCAA and NANTA,” Oyo-Ita affirmed.

However, in a separate interview weekend, the President of NANTA, Mr Bernard Bankole, did not only recall that he had earlier accused the NCAA of not paying enough attention to the downstream sector of the industry, but revealed that “Majority of the unlicensed travel agencies who are mainly foreigners are overshadowing indigenous and other licensed NANTA members because NCAA failed in its regulatory intelligence.

According to him, the inability of NCAA to come out and tell IATA travel agency licencees that you are here illegally unless you register with NANTA which is the Nigerian officially recognized travel agency association remains the frustrating regulatory gap in created by NCAA.

Bankole therefore decried that “The NCAA is paying so much attention to the airlines, believing that we are not much of a problem until they begin to notice fraudulent activities. This is a major problem that we must address”.

Continuing, NANTA boss argued that travel business could be profitable if given the right regulatory attention by NCAA, “but it hasn’t been due to inconsistency and poor regulatory system we have experienced in the past year.”

To crown his submissions, Bankole said that “It has been the lack of regulatory intelligence on the part of NCAA that created a vacuum for the IATA to step in, accrediting and regulating the activities of Nigerian travel agencies from Geneva, Switzerland or Madrid, Spain which is not supposed to be in the first instance”.
“The solution is for us to have proper regulation in the industry through local rules so that foreigners will not come in and take our businesses because people are going out of jobs,” Bankole added.

Besides, further findings by National Daily revealed that the 400 IATA certified travel agencies who operating illegally in Nigeria got their covering fire and boost from mainly foreign airlines who usually serve as their entry route to the Nigerian travel market and that formed the reason behind them getting more jobs from international airlines more than NANTA and NCAA certified agencies.

Several industry analysts who spoke to National Daily on the way forward agreed that the easiest tactics to force the 400 unlicenced travel agencies for NCAA to write all foreign airlines operating in Nigeria to stop honouring any travel arrangements done by any certified IATA members that did not belong to NANTA which is the official travel agency association of the country.

The experts further believed that until this is done, licenced NANTA members will continue to close shops because IATA members seem more linked to foreign airline operators which boils down to maki9ng more money that NANTA/NCAA licencees.