HELD TO RANSOM BY HOTELS
As £100m airlift starts, hotels dish out huge bills and bully families to pay
BRITISH holidaymakers last night told of being held ‘hostage’ in their hotels after staff threatened them with eviction unless they pay thousands of euros following the collapse of Thomas Cook.
Jodie McDade, 30, was among dozens of tourists handed handwritten bills at the Hotel Troya in Tenerife.
Miss McDade, a prison warden from Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, had already paid £900 to go on holiday with her daughter Kara – but was told she would have to pay an extra 451 euros (£398) or face being removed.
She said: ‘My sister spoke with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for me and they advised me to pay the money as it was that or leave.’
Stephen McGonnell and Stacey Robinson, whose nine-month-old daughter Olivia is sick with a chest infection, were also hit with a huge bill. Staff at the all-inclusive resort demanded the couple pay an additional 1,038 euros (£917) on top of the £1,500 they paid Thomas Cook for their ten-day stay.
Miss Robinson, 28, a recruitment consultant from Bolton, said: ‘The manager just wrote the figure on a piece of paper, slid it over to me, smirking, and said “pay or you’re out”.
‘I said we’ve paid for this trip already and we have a sick baby, this is ridiculous. So now we are frightened to leave the room empty in case they come up and remove all our stuff. We’ve been given contradictory advice from Atol, who we have been ringing all day – sometimes they say pay it and other times they say don’t.
‘We don’t know what to do because what if we pay and can’t get it back? So now we’re prisoners in our hotel with a sick baby.’
Yesterday, Britons started to fly home on planes chartered by the CAA.
The £100million operation was beset by delays at many resort airports including Palma in Majorca. Some stranded guests complained of nine-hour delays.
Hotel staff remained unapologetic, claiming they had not recovered money from Atol following the Monarch Airlines collapse in 2017.
The hotel’s reception manager, who identified himself only as John, said: ‘We are waiting for Atol to confirm to us they will cover everything. But when Monarch collapsed the hotel didn’t get anything from Atol, so this time we are being more careful.
‘Some guests have paid, and will be able to claim it back. The ones who don’t will have to leave.’
The situation was similar for Thomas Cook holidaymakers in other resorts.
Mechanic Dylan Hutchison, 24, flew out to Alicante last Wednesday with his wife Charelle, 25, their five-year-old son Leo and another family of three.
The couple, from Glenrothes, Fife, paid £1,400 for the week’s holiday when they booked it a year ago. But just hours after news of Thomas Cook’s collapse the family were given an hour to pay an extra 1,000 euros (£885)or leave.
They were then left ‘abandoned’ on the streets of the resort in 27C heat to find new accommodation.
Mr Hutchison, who has yet to hear whether Easyjet will honour his family’s flight back to Edinburgh Airport, said: ‘We woke up to the news this morning and went down to the reception to check that everything was alright and we were basically told to hand over an extra 1,000 euros or get out.
‘Luckily we were pretty much ready to go anyway but staff were walking families out of their rooms without their belongings. It’s been incredibly stressful and disappointing.
‘I have been trying to get hold of Thomas Cook since we first heard and have heard nothing at all. The hotel staff have also been less than helpful to put it politely.’
In Ibiza, Richard and Sue Moore, from Birmingham, were forced to ‘do a runner’ fromtheir hotel when they were asked to pay extra.
The couple booked a holiday to the Mar Y Huerta hotel through the beleaguered travel operator and were scheduled to fly home last night. However, when they came to check out of their hotel yesterday morning, the Moores, who paid £1,400 for their 11-night holiday, were told: ‘You will have to pay more because we won’t get our money from Thomas Cook.’
Mr Moore, 69, a retired mechanical clerk, added: ‘We just wanted to get out of there because the longer we were there, the more hostile it would have become. We’ve basically legged it.’
The couple’s terrifying plight emerged as the Government kickstarted Operation Matterhorn, a £100million effort to bring back 156,884 Thomas Cook customers stranded in 52 resorts.
Yesterday, an estimated 14,000 travellers were flown back to the UK using a fleet of 62 aircraft
‘We’ve basically legged it’
borrowed from airlines from as far afield as Florida, Malaysia and Africa.
The fleet includes everything from short-haul Airbus A320s to colossal A380 double-deckers and Boeing 747 jumbo jets.
A further 2,000 passengers who were due to fly back yesterday will return today, according to the CAA, which is masterminding the mass airlift – Britain’s biggest repatriation effort since the Second World War.
Although most holidaymakers originally due to fly home yesterday were returned, some have been forced to wait until today and some flights were delayed.
Others are being flown back to different airports than those they set off from.