By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard that Thomas Cook Group, the British travel operator—which encapsulates retail travel agencies, wholesale tour packagers, and even airlines—has shuttered under bankruptcy. This is the largest tour operator failure in not-so-recent memory; it’s left some 600,000 travelers stranded at their foreign destinations, and many tour buyers who haven’t started their trips yet are unlikely to see the tours they bought or any money they prepaid. The issue raises the question: What happens to customers when a tour operator they paid shuts down; are there any legal guarantees of reimbursement? The short answer: only for some people.
Related:What Happens When an Airline Shuts Down? The Thomas Cook Shutdown
As of September 23, all Thomas Cook retail agencies have closed and all tour operations are down. Two affiliated airlines, Condor and Thomas Cook Airlines Scandinavia, are still operating. Condor has told travelers with Condor tickets that it will accommodate them on flights to return home, but will not accommodate travelers who haven’t started Thomas Cook package trips yet.
According to stranded Thomas Cook travelers and multiple media reports, many hotels are owed money—and will probably not be paid—for accommodations they have provided or are now providing. Some hotels reportedly tried to collect replacement payment from travelers, but the general advice from the British government and other authorities has been that travelers shouldn’t be held responsible for the missing payments. The tourism ministry of Turkey ordered hotels not to charge Thomas Cook travelers the missing fees, saying the Turkish government will pay them instead.
About three-quarters of the stranded travelers started their trips from either the U.K. or Germany. The U.K. and German governments have mounted massive efforts to get the hundreds of thousands of travelers home via chartered airplanes, which are being called the “largest peacetime repatriation in U.K. history.”
ATOL: Who’s Likely to Get Reimbursed
British travelers are about the only ones in luck when this sort of situation occurs: Many U.K. travelers booking with a tour company are covered financially by the United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority’s ATOL (Air Travel Organizer’s License), a trust fund established to cover travelers involved in tour-operator failures. The tour operator has to be covered under the ATOL program by paying fees to it (and Thomas Cook was).
There doesn’t seem to be any such existing effort for travelers from other countries, meaning that only Britons who were customers of an ATOL-licensed operator are likely to receive payout. Said customers can file an ATOL claim through the British government, here.
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