Memorandum submitted by Virgin Holidays
This submission seeks to provide evidence relevant
to questions 1,4 and 5 of the committee's framework.
Part of the Virgin Travel Group and with Virgin
Atlantic as its parent company, Virgin Holidays is a tour operator
selling package holidays from the UK to long haul destinations
worldwide. Approximately 350,000 customers per year are carried,
principally to Florida and the Caribbean, but also increasingly,
to destinations including Dubai, Mauritius, South and East Africa,
India and the Far East. The company has been operating since 1985
1.How do the activities of UK businesses
affect human rights both positively and negatively?
Virgin Holidays aims to have a positive impact
on the communities in the destinations in which we operate, both
the UK and overseas. In the UK the company has a programme of
local charitable support, and also allows staff paid time off
to volunteer in the community. Awareness of employment legislation
is kept up to date and of course adhered to, however Virgin Holidays
aims to go beyond this, particularly in the areas of staff training
and development, work/life balance and internal communications
to ensure it lives up to its reputation as an exemplary employer.
Overseas the company has various initiatives
in place to reduce poverty and empower individuals and communities
in holiday destinations. These include:
— the funding of an annual university degree
scholarship for up to four Caribbean students per year to study
tourism management, to empower young Caribbean nationals to be
able to take a leading role in shaping the future development
of tourism in the region;
— an "agro-tourism" linkages
programme operating in St Lucia and Jamaica, in conjunction with
UK development charity, Oxfam, to boost the capacity and incomes
of local farmers and provide a willing market for their produce
amongst hotels on the islands;
— support for a school of entrepreneurship
in Johannesburg South Africa, established to provide youth from
Soweto and other townships with the opportunity to build a better
future for themselves;
— support for a ticketing system for tourist
tribal village visits in Kenya, designed to ensure the local Masaai
population receive maximum financial benefit from tourist visits;
— Virgin Holidays has also adopted the
Travelife system of auditing hotel suppliers for sustainability.
This system assesses environmental impact, staff management, labour
relations and local community integration. Virgin Holidays is
engaged in rolling out a hotel sustainability auditing programme,
utilising the Travelife system worldwide. The company's target
is for 51% of featured hotels to be visited and sustainability
audited by March 2010. With the aim for all hotels contracted
to be engaged with the Travelife scheme by 2013; and
— in addition, Virgin Holidays is the only
mainstream UK tour operator to include a charity donation (of
50p per adult, 25p per child) in the price of every holiday sold.
Initially the funds raised from this scheme were donated to the
charity Tourism Concern—who campaign for human rights in
tourism. Since 2007, however, this has changed to benefit The
Travel Foundation—an organisation with a broader sustainable
tourism remit and more relevant to Virgin Holidays' activities
(with a Tourism Concern representative on the Board). The scheme
raised approx £150,000 for the Travel Foundation (on top
of Virgin Holidays' own corporate donations) in the 2008-9 financial
year.
4. Does the UK Government give adequate guidance
to UK businesses to allow them to understand and support the human
rights obligations of the UK? If not, who should provide this
guidance?
Virgin Holidays would welcome a collaborative
approach and to that end, would be keen to have further advice
and support to allow us to better understand our human rights
obligations.
5. What role, if any, should be played by
individual Government departments or the National Human Rights
Institutions of the UK?
Providing clarity on the extent of responsibility
would be useful, as would guidance for those businesses not merely
wishing to comply, but to go further in ensuring human rights
are respected. The impact of British industry should be looked
at as a whole, rather than just by sector to build up a cumulative
picture of involvement. For example, Virgin Holidays will buy
hotel rooms from suppliers and, as mentioned in answer to question
1 it aims to ensure suppliers do not abuse the human rights of
their employees or the local community. However, Virgin Holidays
does not own hotels, it merely buys and sells hotel rooms. Thus,
it can't easily establish that abuses were not taking place during
hotel construction. Tour operator involvement typically commences
when a property is complete—often many years after completion.
Where hotel construction issues impact the human
rights of local communities, again due to Virgin Holidays lack
of involvement in this stage, in common with other UK tour operators
it relies on information from NGO's such as Tourism Concern, who
campaign on human rights and tourism to raise awareness of particular
issues. This organisation has been effective in raising tourism
related human rights abuse issues amongst tour operators in the
UK—their longstanding campaign against tourism to Burma
is an example. However they are heavily underfunded and would
benefit from government or other agency support.
|
