Companies who want to remain a member of the Council of Australian Tour Operators must become accredited by AFTA under new rules passed last night at the organisation’s annual general meeting.

But the motion was at risk of being derailed as objections were raised at an unusually feisty CATO gathering in Sydney.

In a secret ballot, wholesalers voted 22 in favour and 12 against making participation of the AFTA Travel Accreditation Scheme a requirement of CATO membership. It meant 36 full members of CATO affected by the change failed to vote.

As CATO chairman Rod Eather and general manager Peter Baily called for “solidarity”, several members spoke out against the motion, claiming ATAS accreditation added nothing to CATO members.

TravelManagers chairman Barry Mayo, Albatross Tours managing director Euan Landsborough and African Wildlife Safaris chief executive Stephen Cameron all raised concerns over the motion.

The vote was then delayed at the request of members until AFTA accreditation general manager Gary O’Riordan had addressed the AGM.

The objections visibly frustrated Baily who urged members to support the motion.

“If we didn’t have ATAS we’d have nothing and the industry would fall in a heap,” he said. “ATAS is work in progress, I would accept that, but the value will become apparent. The marketing of ATAS will be better than anything the TCF has ever given us.

“For us not to be involved would be a backward step. We have to be there at the beginning to see it through and develop it.”

Being accredited will give members “increased credibility”, he added.

Mayo responded by insisting for members to vote “we need to understand what the benefits are”.

Far from increasing the credibility of CATO members, Landsborough argued that forcing companies to become accredited carried risk.

“We all know that within one, two or three years a number of companies who will be accredited will fall over,” he said. “I fear that if I’ve got this ATAS logo in my brochures or on my website and Current Affairs say ‘how come these people booked through an ATAS agent, lost everything and there is no recourse’, I will be tarred with the same brush.”

Rather than make accreditation compulsory, CATO members should be asked to buy insolvency insurance as a condition of membership, he added.

“Then we will be bullet proof,” Landsborough said.

French Travel Connection managing director Brad McDonnell warned of possible damage to the CATO brand itself.

“Why as a group are we not negotiating with insurance companies to provide cover and protect our brand?” he said.

Cameron, from African Wildlife Safaris, called on IATA members to be exempt from the motion.

“I support ATAS and it needs to be given a go, but we are a member of IATA and there are more stringent financial requirements in IATA than there are ATAS,” he said. “So I do find it annoying that you have a voluntary scheme to join ATAS but it will be compulsory for full membership of CATO.

“If you are an IATA member you should be eligible for membership of CATO.”

He also called on the vote to be delayed for a year to enable ATAS to find its feet and see how it developed.

Baily hit back insisting CATO had to be supportive of ATAS, and AFTA, from the start.

“What AFTA has done is bloody good,” he said. “We have been given an opportunity by the Government to self-regulate and if we start in-fighting before we’ve even started the Government will turn round and say we’ve got to to back and organise these buggers because they don’t know what they’re doing.

"We have to be supportive for what I believe is a credible alternative to the TCF.

“It might not be perfect but we have to work towards making it more perfect. But I can tell you one thing, it’s going to be much better us regulating it than the Government doing it.”

Earlier, Eather said the future was now in the hands of the industry.

“The most important thing about ATAS and the only thing that’s going to make it work is if ATAS wholesalers work with ATAS travel agents and ATAS travel agents work with ATAS wholesalers,” he said.

“If we walk away from that concept, and we all just accept as a travel agent we’ll deal with any wholesaler, or as a wholesaler we’ll deal with any travel agent that isn’t a part of ATAS, we accept there is a possibility of a downfall and we’ve got a problem.”

After the vote was carried, Eather said new applicants for CATO membership must lodge an application for accreditation within one month, while existing members will have four month to submit their forms to ATAS.

Meanwhile, O’Riordan said he expects 80% of AFTA members to have lodged an application to become accredited within two months of the July 1 launch date.

He also praised CATO for its supportive stance.

“It’s important that we work together,” O’Riordan said. “We wish other industry associations would come out and publically support what we are doing because….I don’t know what the alternative is.”