Financial Protection For Holidays

By Author: Micke Jack
Total Articles: 4
Comment this article

In the current economic climate, it has become increasingly important to make sure that, if your travel provider goes bankrupt before or during your holiday, you have some degree of protection against your holiday falling through without a refund, or worse, being stranded abroad with no affordable route home.

The good news is that customers have quite a lot in the way of fallback protection in the event of this increasingly common occurrence, as long as they take a few simple precautions when booking their holidays.

The simplest and best way to make sure that you have some protection against bankruptcy is by booking your holiday through a reputable, licensed travel operator. There are a number of schemes in operation worldwide that provide customers with some fallback if their tour operator goes under.

The most common scheme used by travel companies in the UK is called ATOL, which stands for Air Travel Organisers Licensing, and is operated by the Civil Aviation Authority(CAA).

If a tour operator is a member of ATOL, this implies that they have given a certain amount of money to the organisation to ...
... pay the costs of refunding customers in the event of their going under.

If an operator does go under, it becomes the responsibility of the CAA to pay for new flights for the stranded customers. If the bonds lodged with the CAA are not enough to cover the cost of all these flights, a second government fund, known as the Air Travel Trust, is obliged to make up the difference.

Whenever you hand over any money to a tour operator, even in the form of a refundable deposit, they are obliged to give you an ATOL receipt. This receipt should include the name of the firm that you have booked with and their ATOL number.

If you booked through an agent, and they go out of business, then the ATOL-registered tour operator that your flights were booked through will be obliged to honour the booking.

Quotebanana.co.uk is a great new site offering holiday insurance quotesfrom a selection of insurers. Buy instantly online.