Shake-up for AA's special award system

The AA is overhauling its procedure for making special awards to hotels and restaurants in a bid to "demonstrate more openly" that the system is "fair and transparent". The move comes just three months after a row over the awarding of five rosettes to London restaurant Pétrus.

Restaurant guide editor Simon Wright resigned when AA managing director Roger Wood overruled the guide's professional inspectors and refused to allow the restaurant to be upgraded to five rosettes. The decison was later reversed, although Wright has not been offered his job back.

Albert Hampson, the AA's hotel services business manager, said last week at the AA awards lunch that the group was changing the make-up of its merit awards committee, which confirms AA inspectors' recommendations for special awards. Wood, who was due to make the announcements, decided to allow Hampson to do so instead, said a spokesman.

The committee will no longer be made up of only AA employees. Instead, half its members will be independent representatives from the hospitality industry. The chairman will be from neither the hospitality industry nor the AA.

The first two independent members of the committee - David Quarmby, chairman of the British Tourist Authority, and Ramón Pajares, president of the British Hospitality Association - have already been appointed.

The AA has announced that Neil Haidar, who has been a restaurant and hotel inspector at the AA for a year, will be the new editor of the restaurant guide.