The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
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of travel company collapses.
The story is always the same. The company ceases to operate the moment insolvency is declared. The airline stops flying, staff stop working, bills are left unpaid. Then civil servants – under the auspices of the CAA and Atol – step in to pick up the pieces. Everything has to be organised from scratch – booking systems taken over, customers and hotels contacted, aircraft chartered. It is an incredibly complicated and expensive solution.
Yet there is a perfectly straightforward alternative. Once insolvency is declared, why not allow the company to wind down in an orderly way? Why couldn’t Thomas Cook Airlines have gone into temporary administration and kept flying its current schedules?
Obviously future bookings would have had to be cancelled, but passengers would not have needed to be rebooked and could have returned home as normal on their original flights. Far fewer civil service resources would be required because some Thomas Cook staff could have been kept on to manage the situation. Currently there are reports that redundant employees are working for nothing in order to help out – highly estimable, but really not fair on them.
This sort of managed plan for a failure is not my idea. It is – in essence – one of the recommendations of the Airline Insolvency Review (Air) which was commissioned by the Government after the demise of Monarch Airlines in 2017. It specifically addressed the problems surrounding the failure of scheduled airlines, but the lessons for tour operators are obviously similar.
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JANE ARCHER
CRUISE EXPERT
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Those who used Thomas Cook to book a break with a third party need not worry about its demise Earlier this month my partner and I booked flights and car hire for a holiday in Australia next January at the Thomas Cook branch in Birmingham New Street. Thomas Cook was our travel agent and the flights are provided by Netflights, part of Gold Medal Travel.
We paid Thomas Cook a deposit of £2,000 and it issued a certificate stating that the total cost (£9,826) is covered by Netflights’ Atol licence. But how do I now pay the balance, which is due on Sept 30? And did Thomas Cook hand over our deposit before it collapsed? Will we have to pay again and reclaim it from Atol?
From our booking reference, I see that our flights to Melbourne with Qatar Airways and Virgin Australia still show as confirmed. We would like to keep these and pay the balance direct to Netflights. But its phone lines are red hot and a recorded message tells callers to hang up if flights are more than two weeks away. Can you help?
EDWARD DUNN
QAGILL CHARLTON
READER CHAMPION
Over the past few days all the attention has been on Thomas Cook’s tour operations, but it also did a lot of business as a high street travel agent. Thankfully, customers who have used it as an agent to book travel arrangements with third-party suppliers do not need to worry about losing their holiday.
Abta has confirmed that if a tour company allows a travel agent to sell its products, any money paid by a customer to an accredited agent is legally deemed to have been paid direct to the supplier. So even if Thomas Cook hasn’t yet paid your £2,000 deposit to Netflights, Netflights has to act as if it has. You will not be asked to pay again and Netflights has confirmed this.
But there is an issue over communication. As an agent, Thomas Cook holds its customers’ contact and reservation details. These will not yet have been passed on to suppliers.
To cope with this problem, some tour companies have set up helplines for people who need reassurance and have to pay balances. Netflights has such a line (0800 054 6826) and when I phoned it this week the call was picked up within five minutes, which I thought efficient given the scale of the problems.
So, all customers in a similar situation to Mr Dunn’s need to contact their supplier direct, give them their name and address and arrange a schedule for any outstanding payments.
There are reports redundant employees are working for nothing to help – not fair on them
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