Kiwi agents feel impact of Australian travel wholesaler’s failure

The failure of an Australia-based travel wholesaler has had fallout in New Zealand.

Excite Holidays has been placed in administration across the Tasman and agents who used the firm here are working through the ramifications for bookings via the company.

The president of the Travel Agents’ Association of NZ (Taanz), Brent Thomas, said only relatively small sums — believed to be in the tens of thousands of dollars — would be involved, but agents throughout the country may have used Excite’s booking system, primarily for hotel reservations.

Excite was not a member of Taanz — which has rules covering agents’ operations — and Thomas said the company quit a similar industry group in Australia about a year ago.

Thomas is also commercial director at House of Travel and said his firm’s exposure was low and it was working to help customers affected, but finding hotels at short notice was a challenge.

“From our point of view they were not a preferred company. We are dealing with each one of those bookings but there is not a big number,” he said.

“Some may take a harder line — we would hope this is not the case.”

Since its inception in 2002, Excite Holidays grew quickly, expanding from a single office in Sydney to include offices in New Zealand, the United States, Thailand, Singapore, Greece and the United Kingdom.

Sydney-based KPMG confirmed it has been appointed as voluntary administrator and a creditors’ meeting has been called for next week.

Thomas said failures over the past year of travel businesses in Australia, and airlines, showed it was a tough business, despite the tourism boom.

“If you speak to the airlines they will tell you how difficult their industry is — it’s a high volume, low margin game.”

Thomas said Taanz required its members to keep client funds separated from their working capital. “If you have issues like this you have to deal with, it comes right off the bottom line. That’s why it’s so important to have separated funds,” he said.

Taanz also requires members to keep a percentage of turnover as a bond and the association has a $100,000 emergency fund.