"This report is nothing more than a self-assessment by the Ministry which oversees TICO to determine whether both parties had done the best job they could. The results of this partisan and self-serving review were totally predictable. Can we expect anything less when someone sets-out to review oneself? The report cannot be viewed as credible when parties which wrote to the Ministry and requested the opportunity to provide input and insight were simply ignored and not even consulted during the assessment process", said ARTA Canada President, Bruce Bishins, CTC.

ARTA Canada reserved its severest criticism for the report's protectionism and complete mischaracterization of the travel wholesaler industry. The report states that wholesalers are the parties with the greatest risk in travel transactions because "wholesalers have already purchased the rights to air flights and hotel stays before the consumer pays for them". ARTA Canada says the Ministry is completely out of touch with how the travel business operates, and if wholesalers had truly purchased these tour components in advance, there would have been no travelers held at gun point in Mexico to pay out what clearly had not been paid by Conquest in advance.

The report recommends that TICO disclose more details about registrants on its web site so that consumers can make better decisions when choosing a travel services provider. However, the report stops short of mandating disclosure of any really useful and hard facts by stating that legal restrictions prevent TICO from revealing this type of information. What the report fails to state is that the legal restraints are of the Ministry's own making, and that the very amendments to the Travel Industry Act which will have to be made to disclose some of the suggested business status information could be easily expanded to include the most relevant information needed by consumers as well.

"The true validity and effectiveness of the report's recommendations can be simply tested by asking only one question: If all of the report's recommendations would have been in place prior to the demise of Conquest, would anything have changed? The answer: NO. From advance notice of business closure solely at the registrant's discretion to providing too limited and questionably valuable business information about registrants, none of these recommendations would have prevented or made the demise of Conquest any less likely" added Bishins.

What the report woefully fails to address is the role of and actions taken by TICO when it had been known for months by TICO that Conquest was in financial trouble and was not in compliance with Ontario's working capital requirements. The report says nothing about how TICO might have handled the situation better and what types of sanctions could have been imposed on Conquest to prevent more bookings from being taken. The report also fails to address the Ministry's previously stated intention to change the composition of the TICO board and TICO's own public concerns that vertical integration in the wholesaler business needs to be reviewed.

ARTA Canada also advised that it was asked by Ontario legislators last Friday to comment on the report and that ARTA Canada will be providing further input at the upcoming review of TICO being conducted by the Audit Division of Ontario's Ministry of Finance. ARTA Canada wants all concerned to be clear that the report released Friday has nothing to do with the ongoing third-party review of TICO.