 |
 |
By David Stevens
Personal Finance Correspondent
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
|
Is It Safe To Book Your Next Holiday?
How to guard against airline failure:
- Do your homework
Read up on your airline – what is its history and is it in the news with stories of cutbacks, strikes, or extraordinary general meetings?
- Get the right insurance
Ensure your travel insurance includes airline failure. If it doesn’t, take out a standalone Scheduled Airline Failure policy.
- Book your flight with a credit card
You’ll receive a full refund if the airline goes bust, and certain credit cards offer all kinds of useful travel assistance (such as the Barclaycard Simplicity credit card), should things go wrong.
 Compare credit cards for use abroad
Related Money News
See our other recent related news stories:
Credit cards that include travel insurance
If you're going on holiday, it is worth making sure you have a credit card that includes travel insurance (and we mean real travel insurance, not useless travel accident insurance).
|
FOR the first time in years, booking next year’s holiday in long in advance is the wise thing to do as travel companies drastically scale back their offers – but is it safe to even book a holiday right now?
The passengers who suffered at the hands of collapsed travel firm XL would tell you that you should probably never travel again.
But by asking yourself a few simple questions first, the economic crisis shouldn’t spoil your sun next summer:
Is your holiday ATOL protected?
We’d probably all heard of ATOL before, but what it is and how important it is to actual holidaymakers was made abundantly clear towards the end of this summer as airlines and holiday companies collapsed like Germans onto sun-loungers.
ATOL – Air Travel Organisers’ Licensing - is a financial protection scheme for UK tour operators.
If the travel company you book your holiday through is ATOL protected, you are guaranteed a full refund if the holiday company goes out of business before you travel.
If you are already away (as thousands of XL customers found themselves this summer) you will be repatriated at no cost to you and you shouldn’t have to cut your holiday short.
Does your travel company issue your tickets straight away?
This year many holidaymakers who had booked their holidays well in advance received a nasty surprise from their travel company when they were asked to stump up even more money as costs had increased between the time the ticket was booked and the time it was issued.
There is nothing to stop a company doing this, so the only way to guard against it is to insist that your tickets are issued to you at the time of booking.
Are you prepared for your airline to fail?
While flight and accommodation package holidays are all ATOL protected, flights booked independently with the airline are not.
So if the airline goes out of business before your holiday (or worse, half way through your holiday), you’ll stand to lose the cost of the ticket as well as all your own repatriation costs.
To guard against this, you should:
- Read up on the airline you’re travelling with and assess the likelihood of it going bust. Remember, even flag carriers aren’t immune, as is evidenced by Italy’s flag carrier Alitalia going into administration recently.
- Ensure you book your flight with a credit card. If the airline goes bust, your credit card company will refund you the full amount, so long as it was more than £100. Compare credit cards.
- Insist that your travel insurance document includes a Scheduled Airline Failure clause. If it doesn’t, there are a number of stand alone insurance policies that guard against this. One word of caution though – read the small print of the insurance carefully, as even dedicated Airline Failure insurance policies may not insure certain airlines!
|
