Qld online travel firm goes under amid pandemic pain

A Sunshine Coast online travel agency has gone under as border closures continue to bite across the sector, with many firms struggling to keep their doors open.

The travel sector hit hard by border closures.

A Sunshine Coast online travel agency has gone under as border closures continue to bite across the sector.

McDonnell Travel, which was a franchisee of the Express Travel Group, was founded in the Sunshine Coast in 2018 and at one stage had a physical shop front at Peregian Springs Shopping Centre.

The business was operated by Craig and Belinda McDonnell who had worked in the travel industry for the majority of their adult lives.

SM Solvency Accountants partner Brendan Nixon says the company has been impacted by travel restrictions introduced last year because of Covid-19. Nixon tells your diarist that the company had ceased trading in July but all cancelled customer bookings had been refunded.

He says creditors at this stage were owed approximately $20,000 but the actual figure was yet to be confirmed.

“One of the creditors is the Australian Taxation Office, and often its debt cannot be confirmed until outstanding lodgments have been attended to,“ Nixon says.

Separately, veteran Bribie Island travel agent John Layton says that many in the sector are barely keeping their doors open because of border closures over the past two years.

Travel sector hit hard by border closures and cruise cancellations.

Layton, who has operated iTalkTravel for the past 25 years, says he has had to lay off his six staff and hand back $6.5m in refunds to customers.

“My wife and I are operating the business on our own,” he says.

Mr Layton says that even if international borders did open in December no money would come in the doors until February or March. His company, which would usually turnover $6m annually, is now earning almost nothing.

He says his firm had been heavily reliant on cruise bookings but now even domestic travel was risky amid continued interstate border closures. He added there was a need for more financial assistance to the troubled sector. Nationally-based STA Travel Group last year went into voluntary administration after its Swiss holding company filed for insolvency.

PORT BOSS SETS SAIL

A global search is on to find a replacement for Port of Brisbane boss Roy Cummins who has announced he is leaving after six years in the top job.

The well-regarded Cummins (illustrated) had led Australia‘s third biggest port through a period of significant growth including construction of the $177m international cruise terminal, the $110m Port Drive upgrade and expansion of the industrial property hub at the facility.

Port of Brisbane says it chief financial officer Neil Stephens would act as interim chief executive until a permanent replacement was found.

Cummins, whose career has also included stints in ports in Russia and the Middle East, leaves with a good track record of achievement. But one job he would be disappointed in not seeing through was a dedicated rail link to the port as the final link in the $12bn inland rail project.

The rail link, first proposed more than a century ago, has a fundamental flaw as the Brisbane end of the line doesn’t go anywhere near the city’s port, instead terminating in the middle of the southern suburbs.

That defeats its main purpose, to get trucks off our increasingly busy roads and make rail a viable alternative to move goods to global markets.

Only 2 per cent of freight to the port currently goes by rail from 13 per cent in 2006, a failing Inland Rail was supposed to remedy.