Did we know Goldtrail were going bust? Absolutely not. Rock Insurance supply our supplier failure cover; they monitor the financial health and risk of all of our suppliers. If they had deemed Goldtrail to be too much of a risk, we would have been notified to, “turn them off”.

We received no such notification until after Goldtrail announced their administration. Problems? Yes, we’ve had a few… Goldtrail were a perennial problem company from a Travel Agent’s perspective. In 2008 we were selling Goldtrail throughout that winter for 2009 flights.

Early that year we began receiving a lot of flight changes, where customers were moved by date and airport with alarming regularity.

This was an administration nightmare from us, and was a really bad experience for those customers affected. For example, a customer booked to fly from Edinburgh on a Wednesday would discover that flight had been changed to Newcastle on the Friday.

After the summer of 2009, we turned them off, deciding we’d rather not sell them until their “firm” flight schedule was released in May this year, rather than having to go through the pain of flight changes again.

Without a doubt their flights offered great prices, although some passengers seemed to view the flight with some of the airlines a “necessary evil” just to get to Turkey.

Our Goldtrail weekend

Friday

We first heard around 7.30pm on the Friday night, and after confirming that it was the case, we began organising for staff to come back to the office that evening.

We had a few hundred passengers in resort who had to be contacted and a few thousand passengers due to travel over the coming months, including some due to depart that weekend.

Our priorities that night were to:

- Contact those due to travel on the Saturday and Sunday to give them a fighting chance to rebook flights and save their holiday.

- Contact our customers in resort and relay what information we could at that point.

- Update the website to make visitors aware of the situation and provide information to those affected.

Following the collapse of XL and more recently the Ash Disruption, we’ve developed a fairly robust system for dealing with these events, an Emergency Plan if you like.

This kicked into action straight away, allowing us to deploy all available staff (even those who normally aren’t involved in day to day Customer Support) to help out.

By the time we closed the office at 1am on Saturday morning; we’d contacted or left messages for all those due to fly out up to the Tuesday.

We’d sent out an email to every customer who had a Goldtrail flight on their booking with us to give them a heads up and reassure them that they wouldn’t lose any money.

Saturday

On Saturday we continued to contact all our customers by phone who had upcoming Goldtrail flights by date of departure order.

Our advice was for them to try and rebook flights as quickly as possible where they could afford to, on the same days as their original flights if possible.

While Goldtrail had gone bust, the airlines they used were still running and those seats would be available again. The sooner they rebooked, the more likely they wouldn’t be paying over the odds as availability became scarce.

By early Saturday morning the news was starting to break into the mainstream media, and the BBC had it as their headline news just after midday.

Our phone system barely managed to cope with the incoming calls, with the result our staff making the outgoing calls had to resort to using mobiles as empty lines were hard to come by!

We sent out another two emails that day to all affected customers with future bookings, keeping them up to date and giving advice on how they would be able to claim refunds from ATOL.

The office remained open until around 9pm on Saturday night.

Sunday

We had almost a full complement of staff in on Sunday, continuing the process of contacting customers and dealing with incoming queries and calls.

We also created a guide for customer on completing the ATOL Claim Form. Previous experience has taught us that any mistakes / omissions from the form result in postal tennis between the CAA, us and the customer.

So we only gave our customers the one page from the form they required to fill in and requested their bank / credit card statement as we had access to all the other documentation required, and could also produce the rest of the ATOL Claim Form filled in with all the required and correct information.

The office was open until 8pm on Sunday night.

The following week

Monday brought news of repatriation flights from the CAA. We also received our first few completed ATOL claim forms from customers who were quick off the mark! Tuesday afternoon we completed the outbound phone calls to all affected customers.

We continued to work through the week with Goldtrail customers as a priority, at the expense of other customers who didn’t have an urgent query. By the end of the week, customer service was about back to normal and responding to all calls and queries.

Holiday protection

We don’t sell Package Holidays. Much is made of the risk of not buying an ATOL bonded package holiday. Every holiday we sell is covered by Supplier Failure Cover, free of charge.

Even if Goldtrail hadn’t been ATOL bonded, our customers would still receive a refund (and in all likelihood significantly quicker than an ATOL claim!).

We actually did our first refund on the Saturday morning and many more since.

Thanks to Chris Clarkson at Sunshine.co.uk for his experiences with the collapse of Goldtrail. Note: this is not a sponsored post. I felt it was useful to consumers to understand the work involved from a travel agents perspective when a company goes into administration.

• Turkey specialist Goldtrail goes into administration
• A consumer’s view of the collapse of Goldtrail
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• Appalling handling of CAA refunds from XL Leisure collapse
• Australian Travel specialist goes into liquidation

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