When you buy a washing machine – you don’t get any financial protection (except that afforded by your credit card, if you use it) – so why should travel products have any protection?

The two reasons are:
* There is often considerable time between payment and product delivery (i.e. you pay 2 months before product consumption) – hence any failure of the travel company between payment and consumption should be protected?
* Some customers can become stranded if their supplier fails while they are overseas. Repatriation needs to be organised.

Apart from these reasons, I don’t see why we need supplier failure cover / consumer protection at all (over and above what is given to any other consumer credit card purchase).

If you are rebuilding your kitchen – and your new washing machine fails to turn up – even though you have built the rest of your new kitchen around the dimensions of your new washing machine – you don’t get any of that additional expenditure back.

The travel industry could discuss endlessly different ways of protecting travel. I am more interested in discussing why consumer facing travel should be handled differently to any other consumer purchase.

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I’ve been booking my own holidays for years, and I love every moment of it – I don’t see it changing anytime soon unless something spectacular happens that rocks my world.

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(UK travel answer) At the moment you have a 2 tier system. One that is fully protected and one that is completely open. The question here is financial protection or total protection. This system is set by our laws.

The total protection provided by tour operators is probably imposable to extend to cover the whole industry. Packages provided protection against financial failures, overbooking’s, acts of god, etc. This would be too expensive for most unprotected companies to swallow.

There is growing calls for full financial protection and very few voices against. (Notably Ryanair who believes customers should choose). The cost of this if done properly is about £1 -£2 per passenger.

The problem is when ask 97% of passengers believe they where protected against the real figure of around 51%. So yes something needs to be done and if the Government had listened to the travel industry years ago we would have all been paying a pound and everyone would have been protected. After all how many people will notice it next to the dozen or so charges already in place? How many people notice the £1 ATOL charge added to the ATOL invoices now?

So I think there should still be a 2 tier system. One fully protected and one financially protected.

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Darren,

I have always travelled independently and veer away from TA’s like the plague. The situation with them won’t change and they will always be ripoff merchants. I much prefer to shop the airlines for the best price. Having said that, there are those in the community that seem to find a kind of security in booking with a TA.

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Personally, I haven’t had any problems with booking my holidays as a consumer. In fact, I dont take the packages from travel agencies – the best way how to be as satisfied as possible is to book your flight and hotel or tour independently. You can choose exactly what you want and of course, you can also lower your budget. The cheapest way is to book low-cost airlines and some kind of cheaper hotels – you can spend the rest of your money doing some more useful stuff than to sit in the very best class in airplane.

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I think it’s pretty much a standard for people to be booking their own travel these days. It’s just so much cheaper when you can do all the research yourself with the many travel search engines that are out there! great site you have here! lots of great info. thanks!

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@Alex. I have heard this washing machine analogy before. It is different. In the case of , say, washing machines, you are talking about a relatively small sum and a retailer who is, in theory, working on a good margin. In travel you are talking high turnover, low margin – a relatively high sum, indeed perhaps a families annual savings, and a retailer who is working on , let’s face it, a very small margin. A better analogy may be a car – though even there, the retailer is on a pretty good margin. Now, stabiliser et al came about in part due to naughty people gathering in a whole batch of famillies savings and then doing a runner. Bonding, etc inter alia, makes sure that that “incentive” is minimalised.
@Barrie – if you avoid travel agents like the plague, you must be very rich. The most expensive way of buying an airline ticket (arguably, anything other than a short haul ticket) is by buying it direct from an airline. It may be you use the likes of expedia and travelocity (the latter being better in my opinion – expedia can be ruddy expensive) – but these are also travel agents. If you avoid travel agents, you will not be easily able to access the CAT45 fares, consolidated fares and the like – which are available through travel agents.
Sorry, anyway, travel industry answer – I favour the levy. As Nick says, it is only £1 or £2 a pop and that means everyone gets covered. RyanAir moan about everything but RyanAir can go bust just as much as anyone else, despite the rather jaundiced views of one Mr O’Leary.

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