TRUSTED ADVICE TELEGRAPH TRAVEL COLLECTIVE

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), responsible for implementing the directive, estimates that an extra 10 million holidays a year will be protected. That sounds positive, but rather than simplify the situation the new arrangements have complicated it.

And nearly a week after the law came into force, neither the BEIS nor the CAA, which is responsible for the Atol protection scheme, has managed to produce any comprehensive guidance for consumers about their new rights. In fact, so far, the only source of advice for travellers are incomplete briefings by the trade body Abta and Citizens Advice (citizensadvice.org.uk).

The key problem is that the Government has created a second category of holiday that offers lower levels of protection – both financial and legal – than a traditional package. Broadly, this “linked travel arrangement” (LTA) covers you if you have “bought two or more travel services in a single visit to a shop or website”. However, in many circumstances, this definition could also constitute a full-blown package and the differences between the two will be hard for a layman to perceive. Abta’s explanation (see abta.com) runs

Our experts make your travel their business

to more than 800 words. Who will read that before booking a holiday?

As the implications become clearer, I will do my best to shed light on your new rights (there are others in addition to financial protection). In the meantime, here are three things you can do to protect yourself:

1. When booking a “package” holiday, ask what protection you have. Is it fully bonded by Atol, or just one of the new LTAs? Book an Atol-protected holiday if you possibly can.

2. Book with a credit card, then at least you will have additional financial protection if a company goes bust.

3. Buy a travel insurance policy which includes cover for the financial failure of travel suppliers (end supplier failure). Most do not, but the one I buy from PJ Hayman (pjhayman.com) does. abroad. Based on inspection of newly shared data from nine million holidays, plus incidents reported by the Foreign Office (FCO) and numbers provided by the Royal Life Saving Society UK, the charity has concluded that 75 per cent of pool incidents are attributable to a lack of supervision. The remaining quarter of serious incidents are caused by diving into shallow water (20 per cent) and getting stuck in filters (five per cent).

The STF analysis also revealed that, of the 30 children who drowned in holiday pools abroad in the past decade, more than half were under the age of four. It also identifies the most common dangers, as follows:

It is estimated that 50 per cent of holidays booked last year were not financially protected