Goldtrail gone bust

peat

I had flights to Turkey for October booked through Airflights.co.uk who are agents for Goldtrail who it would appear have just gone bust. Just my luck, Flyglobespan in the spring now Goltrail. I paid through Nationwide Visa flexaccount debit card. Goldtrail are/were ATOL protected. Thanks to advice from this site I got my Flyglobespan money back through Visa Chargeback. Am I able to do the same again or must I claim compensation from ATOL.

bcl999

Given your track record, will you please post the details every time you book a flight so the rest of us know to avoid that company.

Seriously, sorry to hear about your (repeated) bad luck.

scotty1971

how long will people have to wait to get their money back?

CharleneBelfast85

Hi,
Me and my 2 friends booked our holiday last monday through co-op travel to marmaris turkey, our flights within this package were through Goldtrail. Is it the responsibility of the company we booked through (being co-op travel) to find us alternative flights or refund us, as surely our contract is with them and not Goldtrails? Completely gutted waking up to this on the news and no-one is able to tell us anything.

Impet_Limpet

Happened to us too, booked for 31st August.
Booked via onthebeach, their holidays aren't package holidays so if we don't get alternative flights we can possibly lose the money for the accommadation.

My mum found info saying they (onthebeach) advise we wait to rebook our flights until once availability improves as prices in the short term are very high.

However if we want to attempt to cancel for a full refund on accomm and flights we have to do it right away according to onthebeach.

Sounds like a gamble to me, what if we wait and then the flights are still too expensive, or none are available for they days our accomm is booked. Does there become a time when it's too late to try claim for a full refund?

hippychicknos1

CharleneBelfast85 wrote: »

Hi,
Me and my 2 friends booked our holiday last monday through co-op travel to marmaris turkey, our flights within this package were through Goldtrail. Is it the responsibility of the company we booked through (being co-op travel) to find us alternative flights or refund us, as surely our contract is with them and not Goldtrails? Completely gutted waking up to this on the news and no-one is able to tell us anything.

We spoke to Co-op travel today when they phoned to tell us about Goldtrail going into administraion, but they say that their 1st priority is to get people home first and they will then start to TRY to help people due to fly out on a strict date basis......we are due to fly out on 21st July.....so I don't know where we come in this.

We were shocked like yourselves as we thought that through booking with a company such as the Co-op that we were dealing with a large responsible company and didn't realise that our flight were affected until the call this morning...

Best of luck for getting sorted out

peterbaker

Reading about the plight of so many stranded and disappointed summer holidaymakers has made me angry that the travel industry and the CAA as regulator have yet again failed to prevent the misery that is dumped upon a public who are continually duped into thinking that ATOL & ABTA labels safeguard a holiday promise. Clearly they don't really - it is just some kind of emergency cashflow complicating device in practice. Those of us lucky enough to have several levels of backup e.g. credit cards or the means to pay more now and get it back later might even be tempted to say that ATOL & ABTA just get in the way in cases like this and confuse the position. I mean when that young bespectacled CAA gentleman was on the telly yesterday, did anyone feel reassured when he was using phrases like "in due course" ?

I have done a bit of reading around the Goldtrail story today to look for clues as to whether my suspicions about a company I had never heard of until this week were justified. I am not a serial package holidaymaker having been a DIYer for as long as we have had the internet, so I can see that some customers are Goldtrail repeat customers. I have not been able to find any real justification to my initial thoughts, so I guess we have to be careful what we say as usual. However the most interesting webpage I found was a page I think designed for travel agents here:

http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Articles/2010/07/16/34259/goldtrail+holidays+fails+with+16000+overseas+-+updated.html

and two of the more interesting viewer comments (by travel agents I presume) at the foot of the page were these:

Jul 16, 2010 22:39
Anonymous

Reported

I sorry for all the people stranded out in resorts and also due to go on holiday, but as a travel agent, Goldtrail have been the bain of my life, with messing around agents and customers alike with their shocking operations. Not bookijng holidays til the last minute and then changing holiday details left, right and centre. I am very happy Goldtrail has have gone bust, it will mean less work for me in the long run, less hassle with disgruntled customer about last minutes changes to their holidays. The only problem now is getting these people home and helping customers who are due to travel (but apart from that i'm very happy). GUTTED GOLDTRAIL thank god there are no other companies like you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jul 17, 2010 09:33
Anonymous

Reported

in response to:- Jul 16, 2010 23:50 Anonymous Reported To the comment by anonymous at 22:39 - you say are a travel agent and if you think the company was so bad, why bother booking with them?? A booking is a booking, money is money, times are hard. You have to be prepared to put up with the crap, but it all got too much, we put a stop sale on goldtrail a few months ago. As you can imagine bookings made months ago come back to haunt you when Goldtrail change something. It was standard practice with Goldtrail. Basically they would take a booking from people, so they would use fake flight times etc etc. Then months later actually book the holiday, the original obviously isnt there and so they book something and so its an operational change. STANDARD GOLDTRAIL. Just going through my bookings, got 16 people to re organise holidays for and a few in resort. Strangley no customer has rang me about their goldtrail holidays.

So it looks like an insider or two jumped ship months ago.

Talking of jumping ships, until February this year, the Sales and Marketing Manager for Goldtrail was a certain Joe Lavers who was on a major travel convention delegate list with his boss, the apparently uncontactable Kadir Aydin, as late as October 2009. On Joe's LinkedIn profile, he says he was with Goldtrail until February 2010.

Yesterday, 17 July in the above article, as Sales and Marketing Director for competitor Holidays4U, we have Joe touting for new (Goldtrail replacement) business in the aftermath of the Goldtrail collapse. Interestingly again, he suggests that customers in a position to rebook should rebook quickly. This is slightly contrary to the advice from Onthebeach.co.uk who seem to be advising their customers whose failed holidays haven't started yet to be patient and wait for their call.

When Joe Lavers moved to Holidays4U it seems that one of the things that tempted him to move was that the Holidays4U product was "honest". On 1st February, 2010, on the ttglive.com website he is quoted:

"Holidays4U has quietly been providing a good value, quality, honest, customer service driven product and I look forward to increasing sales in general but mainly via the travel trade."

I am sure we would love to know what Joe does about how this might have happened

bagand96

Reading about the plight of so many stranded and disappointed summer holidaymakers has made me angry that the travel industry and the CAA as regulator have yet again failed to prevent the misery that is dumped upon a public who are continually duped into thinking that ATOL & ABTA labels safeguard a holiday promise.

I slightly disagree with your views on the ATOL scheme. It never promises to safeguard a holiday, just the financial aspect thereof. It also, crucially, gets people home. The vast majority of Goldtrail customers due to return to the UK this weekend have done so on the exact flight they were planned to. They have not had to shell out for new return flights at inflated prices.

Those who are yet to travel have of course lost the holiday. However, they will get there money back. Granted it is not instant, but ATOL will refund them in due course. Part of the reason the CAA don't know much yet is that Goldtrail failed on a Friday so the weekend won't have helped. Even ATOL admit their process is not instant - although it should be better than the XL collapse as Goldtrail was no-where near on their scale. The saddest thing is that the Onur, Turkuaz, and Saga flights that have bought people back this weekend have returned empty, probably leaving many gutted passengers at the airports.

Not sure what went wrong at Goldtrail, however I do know that at my local airport, they were operating double the flights this summer than they did last summer. Everyone expected Turkey to be popular this year with the eurozone issues, but doubling your presence in the middle of a recession? Did they just get it drastically wrong?

I have done a bit of reading around the Goldtrail story today to look for clues as to whether my suspicions about a company I had never heard of until this week were justified.

It gets better than your man who moved to the competitor recently... when XL collapsed, one of their big men went to Goldtrail, to launch a new Greece programme for them. Flights for this new Greece operation were sourced from a new broker Kiss Flights, which was set up by some ex-XL management only DAYS after XL went under. Kiss Flights chartered Viking Airlines - an airline with a significant stake owned by a certain Phil Wyatt.

Like I said, I don't know what went wrong at Goldtrail, and it could all just be a huge coincidence. But is it me, or whenever a big(ish) tour operator has gone under over the past decade, similar names always seem to appear?

peterbaker

That XL connection is probably another generally known only to industry insiders ... you'd have thought the CAA would be watching that like a hawk.

I see we have another new thread in this forum this morning relating how Holidays 4U appear to have just landed a significant flight change on a customer with just 3 weeks notice ... http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=2601813

One can't help wondering if actually we just have a few surviving players in the same old game who perhaps* blocked seats on the same charters as Goldtrail? So as (some of?) those flights have been kiboshed, then a kind of 'boiling down' and reshuffling might be occurring? This would refill the Goldtrail seats vacated on later flights with other affected holiday companies' offloads from flights now made uneconomic by the pulling of the Goldtrail business ? Can anyone confirm that might be happening?

No matter how cheap the package, herding/corralling summer holiday-makers like errant sheep 'discovered' in the wrong field just before market day is simply not on, is it?

*Edit: Sorry bagand96 , I see you have already indicated on the other thread that indeed the surviving competitor package companies charter the same flights as Goldtrail ..." Plenty of scope for shenanigans, eh?

bagand96

One can't help wondering if actually we just have a few surviving players in the same old game who perhaps* blocked seats on the same charters as Goldtrail? So as (some of?) those flights have been kiboshed, then a kind of 'boiling down' and reshuffling might be occurring? This would refill the Goldtrail seats vacated on later flights with other affected holiday companies' offloads from flights now made uneconomic by the pulling of the Goldtrail business ? Can anyone confirm that might be happening?

The honest answer is I don't know. Holidays4U are a very similar operation to Goldtrail, so are of course well placed to take on some capacity or reshuffle flights. That said, both companies were always experts at moving customers flights around multiple times before the holiday.

I don't know if H4U and Goldtrail ever shared seats on the same flighs. I know at my local airport Goldtrail chartered, on their own, 4 flights a week with Onur Air, Saga and Turkuaz. These flights will now no longer happen - a huge capacity reduction. H4U don't operate from the airport so no relacement (yet?!)

H4U use the same airlines so of course will now be able to add capacity or refine their programme through the relations they already have with the carriers. Whether its something more sinister or just them making the best of their main competitor folding I don't know.

I wonder where the same old XL assosciates will crop up next - there aren't many small operators left.

Moonchild

On a same same but different theme.... http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Articles/2010/07/19/34266/monster+travel+boss+is+director+of+new+holiday+company.html