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'I voted for this government – but its career politicians have failed entrepreneurs like me'

No African country has been handed a "travel corridor", pushing millions of people who rely on tourism towards poverty - getty
No African country has been handed a "travel corridor", pushing millions of people who rely on tourism towards poverty - getty

This week should have been one of the most celebratory of George Morgan-Grenville’s career. And – in many ways – it still will be. Tomorrow, the founder and CEO of luxury travel brand Red Savannah will receive a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, in recognition of the company’s performance in the US market in the last three years. But when he stands up to accept this accolade from a Lord-Lieutenant, he will do so with conflicted feelings.

“Obviously, we are absolutely thrilled to win it,” he says of what is one of the most prestigious stamps of quality a British company can carry. “But my emotions are going to be very mixed. Between intense pride in my company, the extraordinary team of staff we have, and everything we have achieved – and then a great sense of sadness that the Government I voted for has failed to protect the very business which they are rewarding.”

Morgan-Grenville picks his words carefully – but he has earned their withering tone. The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise are handed out in four categories – innovation, sustainable development, “promoting opportunity through social mobility”, and international trade. It is in the latter that Red Savannah has excelled – meeting the requirement of “steep year-on-year growth (without dips) in overseas sales” over a three-year window. It has done so by building its operations on the far side of the Atlantic, finding favour with American travellers to an extent that, Morgan-Grenville says, have made for “42 per cent growth between 2018 and 2019, bringing several million dollars of business into the UK”. And yet, as 2020 has tripped further and further along its dark path, he has seen the conditions that allowed for such success eroded. Not just by Covid, but, he says, by Westminster’s mishandling of the crisis – which has left the British travel industry in a terrible situation.

This year has been so bad, he says, that it will be impossible for other travel companies to win a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the same category in the foreseeable future – 2020, he argues will leave too big a hole in everyone’s sales for the eligibility criteria to be met.

With over three decades of experience in the travel industry – two of them before he set up Red Savannah in 2011 – Morgan-Grenville knows precisely what he is talking about.

“I have managed travel businesses through two Gulf Wars, the SARS outbreak, 9/11, the financial meltdown of 2008 – and various other epidemics that have reared their heads,” he states, with a shake of the head. Cheltenham-based Red Savannah is a well-established industry name, selling tailor-made holidays to Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America and Australasia – and high-end villas in the likes of Tuscany, Greece and Antigua. But as the pandemic has continued to bite, Morgan-Grenville has been forced to make 30 per cent of the firm’s workforce redundant – and is expecting to make a “substantial six-figure loss” by the year’s end. “The current situation has been so difficult because it has gone on for so long,” he adds, “but also because there has been so little support. The messaging from Westminster has been very confusing. It has resulted in a great deal more uncertainty and fear in the market than I’ve seen in any other crisis.”

For this, he largely blames a government which – he argues – does not understand the travel industry, and can only proffer empty platitudes where decisive action is required.

“Every arm of government that has been approached by the various sectors of the travel industry has responded with similar statements of their concern,” he says. “But they haven’t actually done anything. The real problem – the crux of the issue here – is that the Government doesn’t understand how the tour-operating and agency side of the industry works. You would think that a £213bn industry would have a heavyweight minister with a solid commercial background; somebody with knowledge of the entire industry.”

He goes further.

“This is just my opinion,” he continues, “but if you look at the heart of government, there are a number of senior members who have climbed the political ladder without ever having started or run their own business. How can they possibly hope to understand what it’s like to lie awake at night – worrying about how you are going to keep your company going, or about having to lay off terrific members of loyal staff? How can anyone understand or empathise with what they’ve never done themselves? And it isn’t just this government. It’s a broader problem with politics today. You have too many people who are career politicians. They have no real understanding of how basic economics works.”

He saves some of his criticism for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the blanket use of advice against non-essential travel that has restricted the flow of people in and out of the UK to a comparative dribble. This, he emphasises, has “created a great sense of fear and uncertainty in the market – which the Foreign Office has exacerbated by putting a travel ban on most of the countries that people might reasonably want to visit.”

Last week Italy become the latest country to be removed from the travel corridors list - getty
Last week Italy become the latest country to be removed from the travel corridors list - getty

This, in turn – he suggests – has badly damaged the reputation and standing of a department of state which used to be held in high esteem for the clarity of its judgement.

“FCO advice used to be the gold standard of travel advice,” he continues. “It was taken very seriously by the industry, because it was intelligence-led. If the FCO declared that there was a defined security risk in a specific destination, everybody believed this. Operators were very quick to get their clients out of that destination – and to not send any more. The problem with this politically-led advice against all but essential travel is that it has undermined and demeaned the advice in the first place – it has become meaningless.”

This one-size-fits-all approach has also, Morgan-Grenville adds, caused harm far beyond the UK. Not least in Africa. Not a single African nation has appeared on the FCO list of permitted destinations since it moved to advise against all non-essential international travel in March – despite, in many cases, lower infection rates than those seen in western Europe. The result has been a shadow cast across the whole continent’s tourism product.

“It is very easy to take the stance that every other country has handled this crisis less well than us – and that, therefore, travel is dangerous,” he says. “But many countries in Africa have handled this virus very well. In fact, many African countries are used to handling viruses, and are very good at it.” A quick glance at the statistics will tell you that this is no controversial opinion. For example, Kenya has suffered a reported 832 deaths from Covid-19, compared to the more than 43,000 fatalities in the UK. You would not know this from the FCO’s position on Africa. And nor are the consequences widely appreciated.

“What is happening to tourism in Africa is a tragedy,” Morgan-Grenville continues. “People should be encouraged to go, and travel sensibly, because the economies of those countries are being destroyed. If you take somewhere like Kenya, every person employed in the travel industry typically supports about seven other people – so this is creating economic devastation. It is ruining anti-poaching efforts. It is ruining all the many educational projects that are supported by tourism. People do not realise what is happening in the world – or that travel supports one in ten jobs elsewhere on this planet.”

He admits that his own year could have been much worse – and that Red Savannah was in a position to weather at least some of the storm. “We were lucky in many ways, in that we went into this pandemic with a strong balance sheet,” he explains. “We’ve refunded every client who wanted it. In many cases, we’ve had to use our own capital to do this.”

The year might have been a lot different. In two different ways.

“If we wind the clock back to February, we were 61 per cent ahead of where we were at the same time in 2019,” he continues. “All the indicators pointed to a record-breaking year. But if we hadn’t gone in with our strong balance sheet, it could have been terminal.”

As with many influential figures in the travel industry, Morgan-Grenville sees a proper system of airport testing as key to getting the world moving again – but he is not expecting too much good news in the coming months. “I think that the first and some of the second quarter of next year will be as difficult as the last quarter of this year. I don’t foresee much improvement. I do think things will start to normalise in May, and I hope that, by Q4 next year, we will be starting to see an air of normality. But I can’t believe that we are going to go back to anything like a normal year until 2022 – at the earliest.”

Nonetheless, his team is beginning to see faint green shoots. “We are getting some European bookings for 2021,” he says, with an air of caution. “We are seeing bookings for villas, gulets, resorts and hotels. Not urban resorts; beach resorts – with a tendency towards the smaller ones. We’re seeing very little in the way of long-haul bookings. But there is starting to be some interest. And there is very clearly a latent demand for travel.”