The Nigerian Travel Agents under the auspices of the National Association of Nigeria Travel Agencies (NANTA) has said foreign airlines operating in Nigeria now demand as much as N4 million for airflight tickets and as much as N1 million to change ordinary date.
Mrs. Susan Akporiaye, the President of NANTA, disclosed this at a press conference held in Lagos on Thursday.
According to her, this unacceptable, exploitative and hostile to the survival of Nigerian aviation downstream sector despite the fact that the federal government has paid more than half of their trapped fund.
She said “It is sad that Nigerians have to buy tickets to the tune of N3m to N4m and be charged as high as N1m to change travel dates even on tickets bought before this problem started.
“This is unacceptable, exploitative, and hostile to the survival of Nigerian aviation downstream sector and to which we call for sanity and return to the best inventory practices and deployment.”
Explaining the reason for the unreasonble jumped in flight tickets, Mrs. Akporiaye said Nigerian travel agents were logged out of Global Distribution system of airlines to ensure that they can not directly access flight tickets at actual price, largely due to their over $400 million trapped fund.
However, she claimed over 50% or $265 million of the $464 million trapped fund has been cleared by the federal government.
“Just recently, the Federal Government through the Central Bank of Nigeria released about $265m to service these trapped funds and to which IATA hailed Nigeria for taking strategic measures to end the problem,” she said.
“Sadly, that gesture instead birthed an order that emboldened the foreign airlines to visit the Nigerian traveling public with the most exploitative response in the name of protecting their business.
“As usual with them, their response which we could describe as “high fare pandemic, is solely targeted at Nigeria and Nigerians, and cannot be seen anywhere in Africa even in countries where they also have their funds being trapped.”
