Travel agent kept £225 when coronavirus cost us our China holiday

LAST July, my wife, daughter and I used travel agent Carlton Leisure to book flights to Beijing with British Airways, returning via Hong Kong, with an internal flight between there and Chengdu.

We had planned this trip for the Easter holidays. However, due to the coronavirus, British Airways cancelled our flights and told us to contact Carlton Leisure for a refund.

This my wife did only to discover that each ticket incurs an administration fee of £75 (total £225). If we had booked directly with British Airways we would be receiving a full refund.

We are disgusted by this. We didn’t choose to cancel and feel that any fee should be waived in this circumstance.

We had been planning this holiday for nearly nine months and saving for more than 18 months. This is a real kick in the teeth.

A. C., Ashford, Kent.

I checked carlton Leisure’s terms and conditions and there is, indeed, a £75 per person administration fee for cancellations.

however, I agree with you. This is not a case of you simply changing your mind. These are exceptional circumstances.

carlton Leisure has now taken a similar view and has reduced its fee for cancellations linked to coronavirus to £25 per person. So you have had £75 deducted from your refund rather than £225.

I did ask for the fee to be waived completely, but was told: ‘We have already checked this with our senior management but unfortunately we won’t be able to waive [the fee] completely.’

In the financial world, regulators have laid down rules on what constitutes a fair administration fee. This saw, among other things, charges for late payments on credit cards cut to £12.

There is also a general principle that any fee should reflect fairly the actual cost of administration and not include a profit margin.

At this time it is reasonable for travel agents to take a small fee reflecting the work involved, but any extra would sully their reputation — and that of the industry. WE WROTE to TalkTalk last July to say we no longer needed a landline and asked the firm to disconnect us. We stopped our direct debit in August, but are still receiving bills even though we have no house phone.

I have written five times; twice by recorded delivery.

The bills came to £148.78 and we were worried about getting into debt, so we sent a cheque and another letter asking TalkTalk to cut off the line.

A few days later we received a debt recovery firm letter for £148.78. TalkTalk claimed it had not received our cheque.

So we sent another to the debt recovery firm. Both cheques were cashed, so we wrote to ask for our money back.

We then received a bill showing that we are in credit, but the firm is still taking £44.95 each month.

A. S., Worcester.

Am I alone in suspecting that some telecoms firms put paper letters straight into the bin?

TalkTalk says no disconnection requests were logged or recorded on the account. It claims it didn’t receive your letters.

It says it checked the tracking references and found the first was incomplete and invalid. It says it could not find the second.

however, it does confirm that two payments were recorded in November. It has now refunded both, one of which was incorrectly charged to you and the other as a goodwill gesture. Your account has also been closed.

TalkTalk’s website instructs those who wish to cancel to phone 0345 172 0088 or write to Talktalk correspondence department, PO Box 675, Salford m5 0NL.

You must include your full name, your TalkTalk phone number and your signature.

Bear in mind that if you are in contract, there will be termination charges — and don’t cancel your direct debit until the final bill has been agreed and paid. MY MOTHER died last year and I’ve been trying to transfer money from her savings account with Halifax into an executor account since January 24.

Initially, I was told this would take up to three working days. Six days later it had not arrived. So I rang the bereavement department and was told that as it was a large sum (£80,000), it would be split over two payments, one

arriving on January 31 and the other on February 3.

It hadn’t arrived by these dates either, but this time the handler said he wasn’t aware of the split payment and the money hadn’t been transferred because the scan of the grant of probate had not come through.

On February 6, I received a letter saying my mother’s savings account had been closed and the money transferred to a new account in her name.

The situation is getting worse and it’s affecting my physical and mental health.

J. M., Chesterfield.

ThIS is exactly the sort of behaviour from banks that money mail has worked hard to put a stop to since the launch of our Looking After Your Legacy campaign in 2015. Bereaved relatives should not have to deal with this sort of red tape.

halifax says it’s ‘extremely sorry’ you received ‘a level of service well below the high standards’ it expects.

It admits a number of errors were made and says it has shared the case with employees to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

The funds have now been transferred into an executor account and a distress payment has been made.