Ian McMahon's Perspective – September 2010
The crucial challenge facing PATA
EVEN this aged editor was not around when what is today called the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) emerged as a force in the global travel industry.
PATA has its origins in the 1950s when individuals with interests in growing Pacific region tourism – notably Hawaiian newspaper publisher Lorrin P Thurston and Pan American executive William J Mullahey – decided to set up an association of tourism industry leaders with the aim of promoting a then largely undiscovered region.
Through the 1960s and the 1970s the association, then called the Pacific Area Travel Association, grew in influence and power with a membership that embraced airlines, NTOs, hoteliers, tour operators, educators and other industry members.
Its annual conferences were high-powered affairs and countries competed vigorously for the right to host them. It published its own magazine (Pacific Travel News); it had a network of promotional chapters throughout the US, UK, Europe and other source markets for Pacific destinations (including several in Australia); and it established highly successful travel marts to bring buyers and sellers of Pacific travel face-to-face.
In the 1980s PATA gained a new injection of energy and dynamism as Asia’s burgeoning tourism industry came into its own. Eventually it was renamed the Pacific Asia Travel Association and its headquarters moved from San Francisco to Bangkok.
It is not easy to pinpoint exactly when PATA’s prestige and influence peaked and when its slow decline began. But the 1990s saw the chief executives of major companies, particularly airlines, who had previously included PATA as part of their personal portfolio, delegating this to middle management. At the same time travel industry journalists attending PATA conferences found themselves increasingly reporting on the political intrigues of a factionalised membership rather than on promotional, research and educational activities (although the association continued to do good work in these areas).
In 2009 PATA appointed a new chief executive Greg Duffell with a mandate to implement structural, operational and governance reform. PATA supporters were hopeful he could give the association a new lease of life. Sadly, Duffell has this month announced his resignation 12 months before his three year contract was to end.
A PATA statement says Duffell has turned PATA into “a more robust and transparent financial and business operation” but he recognises that the next phase of its development “requires a different skill focus”.
Leading Bangkok-based travel journalist Imtiaz Muqbil’s excellent Travel Impact email newsletter has this take on Duffell’s departure – “Duffell soon found that executing an ‘agenda of change’ was easier said than done. In no time, he got bogged down in the same old internal PATA politics, especially the parochial machinations of a small coterie of board members who seriously damaged his morale within a few weeks of him starting work”.
Muqbil’s report provides detailed analysis of the challenges facing PATA. Clearly its immediate, crucial challenge is to find a replacement for Duffell. The quality of that appointment could well decide whether PATA survives, let alone regains its former stature.