That is why they have legal release forms….personally, unless it is a guided tour, the tour operator doesn’t have much of a responsibility I think. if it conforms to pre-agreed upon expectations, then both parties have met their fiduciary duties…

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The trial is expected to take place in November, with 11 Greeks also facing charges along with the two Britons. It is a terrible tragedy. Fumes from a neighbouring apartment apparently leaked in. The source, was not in their own unit. I found this on google, so it may be incorrect. My thoughts are with the poor family.

http://itn.co.uk/news/0c13fb889899d6431ee672c3ba424570.html

There are millions of holiday makers, booking online and renting out private apartments and villas each year, direct with the owners on websites that advertise them. I expect the private owners may not live in these units and would not consider to provide any test, or follow safety guidelines. By comparison, large Tour Operators do have to inspect properties and carry out health and safety inspections, as far as I know anyway.

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Firstly, I would like to introduce myself as a regular follower of the blog. This is, however, the first time I have commented. I am the CEO of Check Safety First, which supplies health and safety risk management audit systems to hotels, holiday properties and restaurants around the world. Our E-Cristal system provides hotels with a template for health and safety processes and centralises their management to present a chain-wide view of standards. This is also supported by monthly, unannounced, audits and advice to ensure hotels are compliant with the standard, which is developed in accordance with World Health Organisation guidelines.

When holidaymakers go away, they often, wrongly, assume that the hotel they have booked to stay in has reached a certain standard of health and safety, particularly if they are paying £800 a week. It is the hotel and tour operators responsibility to ensure that this is the case moving forward.

One of the most important things that travel agents can do to protect their customers is to ask their hoteliers for independent evidence of their commitment to an ongoing health and safety programme. High standards cannot be achieved without a considerable amount of effort and dedication and travel agents shouldn’t leave their guests well being to chance. In doing this, they will be protecting both their customers and their reputation.

Achieving a close working partnership between hotels and tour operators will ensure consistent standards of health and safety are more regularly monitored and maintained. Clearly existing systems don’t do enough to protect guests and action must be taken to resolve the issue rather than simply apportion blame after an event.

Unfortunately, the star system, which consumers have long accepted as the benchmark for accommodation quality, does not cover issues of health and safety. In fact, the system allocates points for facilities, rather than the condition of them.

Rant over, this is a subject that I am very passionate about.

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Darren

Tour Operators do Health and Safety checks on the accommodation they use and did so on this hotel. So the question is how did this situation arise, is it the tour operator or someone else at fault, well that is for the court to decide.

What I will say is that the tour operator’s defense is that they have a signed document from the hotel at the time of the Health and safety inspection a few months before stating that “no gas appliances are in use”. If this had not been the case the tour operator would have required the service document and made an independent check on them.

Also one thing that Mark does not mention is that his company provides ABTA with its health and safety service.

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I used to be a tour operator. We spent large sums of money on Health & Safety training and overseas inspections to protect customers. We carried out customer research about this and similar topics. H&S (and financial bonding/protection) were clearly invisible ‘hygiene’ factors – customers just didnt want to think about things going wrong. But when the shit does hit the fan, either with a fatality or an airline/company going bust – THEN people take notice – for a full 5 minutes. But it seems few are prepared to pay a reasonable price for a holiday that includes the costs of H&S programmes and financial bonding – they want the cheapest deal, not the best value from a responsible company. On the whole, I’m glad I am no longer a tour operator.

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Mark has some good ideas. Unrealistic, but good ideas. Why? Read what Jane has to say. Having given travel agents (and operators) a good kicking and (seemingly) the Public objecting to their getting any sort of renumeration, Mark now expects agents to phone up and make check health and safety.

No, I don’t think so. Jane is quite right; having forgotton everything 5 minutes after an incident, people get back to “Canary Travel” – ‘cos everything has to be cheep-cheep. Further, the health and safety standard of whom, pray? UK standards? Spanish standard? Greek standard? What about Africa or other far away places?

I do not for one moment wish to belittle the Greek tragedy – it was a terrible, terrible event but it was also a fairly unusual incident, given that there any many thousands of holiday apartments and it was with a reputable operator.

I have visited many people’s homes, here in the UK. Do we all have smoke detectors? Carbon Monoxide detectors? How many of us have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen? Do you, Darren, have a perfectly H&S proof home? No, yet when we go away, no matter to which corner of the planet, we expect every conceivable safety feature.

In fine, every operator has to rely on the man on the ground, so one must learn all the lessons from this and move on. We forget that many resorts do not cater just for Brits; many other nations rely a lot more on the good common sense of the holidaymaker. Perhaps one duty of care tour operators have is to make sure that the holidaymaker is not a complete egit who leaves their brain cell at Gatwick to disappear for two weeks down a bottle of San Miguel. Or we could just restrict Brits to certain destinations, such as Benidorm and Bognor.

I do feel that it is important for us to feel safe on holiday, but not to the extent that the duty of care of the holidaymaker (underlined!) disappears. There is a certain New World approach of “if something happens to me, it must be somebody else’s fault” creeping in, which is very dangerous.

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While I agree that if you are a young single traveller going to some remote part of the world or on a hen or stag weekend in Spain, health and safety would not be top of your agenda and understandably so. However, if you are travelling with a young family or are an elderly person who is on some form of medication then it is a different ball game entirely. They will need the reassurance that a tour operator or travel agent won’t be sending them to a hotel that could potentially be putting their health at risk.

It doesn’t matter where the hotel is, systems can be put in place to minimise the risks to the public. The reality is travellers are just as likely to fall ill when staying in a Spanish hotel with poor kitchen hygiene standards as they are holidaying in a sub-tropical destination.

Anybody who has ever experienced food poisoning will never want to have it again, especially if they are away on a holiday that they have saved all year to be able to go on.

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If you have a young familly or an elderly person on medication, should you be travelling? Apart from finding insurance difficult for an elderly person on medication, this should be viewed in context. Not so many moons ago, a holiday meant Blackpool or Torquay – time has meant that we can go much further away for often less money, yet we expect exactly the same as here. Remember the old Monty Python sketch about “.. a nice place round the back … with Walls Pork sausages, Smith’s crisps and bloody Watney’s Red Barrell”?

Yet even Spain has a seperate culture, different ways of doing things, different food. We expect, say, bacon in the morning; we do not eat local and very often do not behave local. “They” do not know what bacon is and serve up fried ham we eat it, get ill and blame everyone save for ourselves. Now, any tour operator can and does (usually) make sure a place meets a minimum standard but it is down to us, the holidaymakes, to take a lot more responsibility for our own welfare. We Brits have no right for any other country to do things our way any more than we should do things the Greek, Spanish or Turkish way – and frankly, given the abominable service and standards in some UK hotels I can think of, we have a lot of “splinter out of the eye taking” to do, before we get the beam out of other’s.

I can remember, whilst working “on the counter”, having to put people off travelling to certain destinations as I knew the customer and knew that they could not handle it. I knew “young families” who wanted to go to Dubai in August, or elderly and infirm people trying to go to Turkey – a tour operator can make sure places are fundamentally sound but they cannot deal with what is, (not in the Greek case, I hasten to add) the fundamental stupidity of some people’s holiday aspirations. As a sideline, let us remeber that carbon monoxide posioning happens here as well – and achieves headlines – how many people have carbon monoxide detectors at home? Do you? Yet with the advent of online booking, a first defence line of the travel agent is missed. People can book what they want, where they want.

They can take a young familly to India or the elderly and infirm to Kalkan, they will behave exactly the same there, as they do here and as long as that continues, they will get tummy problems, they will find places unsuitable and they will have no-one else to blame, really, than themselves.

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The whole thing is a mess. I worked for tour operators for 15 years and it was a mess when I started and it’s still a mess. Ideally the solution (EU-wide, at least) is for the EU to take greater interest and place more responsibility on the hotel owners. Of course, the tour operators should have some responsibility, but some of the main problems for smaller operators are:

- The level of cooperation of some hoteliers when it comes to H&S is almost zero in some cases. Some larger hotels might have contracts with 50 different operators. For each of those to do a full audit becomes very time consuming. Hotels don’t like anything that costs them money, and H&S does just that. They are happy for a certain amount of reponsibilty to be placed with the TO, but don’t cooperate accordingly.
- The cost. Some operators contract accommodation where they may only receive two or three bookings in a season. To do a full, professional H&S audit on each property is prohibitively expensive. You end up with poorly or untrained people doing the checks, which then become worthless.
- Tour operators aren’t responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a hotel. Therefore, any H&S audit becomes instantly out of date, because hotels won’t inform TOs of any maintenance issues or things that change. Most TO’s don’t even have a daily presence at each property, so anything can change H&S wise that makes everything irrelevant: doors can be locked, fire extinguishers can be moved,etc.

The only solution, as far as I can see, is to have a recognised standard that hotels must achieve. A hotel tax could be imposed on each hotel, paid per guest, payable to an EU body, which then funds spot-checks and visits. Failure to achieve standards can result in instant closure, hefty fines, etc. It could be combined with GMs being required to hold a license to run a hotel and the ability to revoke that license if H&S standards aren’t maintained.

It will never happen though.
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@ Karen
Quite agree. Interesting to hear the T Op’s perspective.

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