Insurance for DIY holiday - flights

YJ68 · 21 February 2015 at 3:05PM

Looking for some guidance on what travel insurance I need to cover the following scenario.

We have booked a holiday, flights and villa separately.

Part of our party have booked flights through Olympic Holidays to fly with Norwegian Air, others booked directly with Norwegian Air. Now Olympic have provided us with an ATOL certificate but my query is, does the ATOL protection with Olympic cover us if Norwegian Air went bust? The ATOL certificate says it covers us if Olympic Holidays stops trading - nothing about if the airline went bust. So should I take out insolvency insurance to cover us for that? (I will be emailing Olympic as well about this but just thought I'd tap into the knowledge of others who may be able to shed some light for me)

Alternatively, as we have booked the flights on a credit card, and the total cost of the flights is over £100, if the airline went bust, would we be able to claim via Section 75 if we didn't have the insolvency insurance and the ATOL protection via Olympic didn't cover us?

Thanking you all in advance for any assistance!

jonesMUFCforever · 22 February 2015 at 3:24PM

Who did you pay for the flights and were they over £100 each?

Alan_Bowen · 22 February 2015 at 5:55PM

If you have an ATOL Certificate for flight only bookings, the Certificate protects against the failure of the ATOL Holder in this case, Olympic Holidays. this is presumably because they haven't issued you with an e ticket as yet. Bookings direct with the airline are not ATOL protected, so if you think Norwegian may go bust, and I think that is unlikely, then you do need insolvency protection. There are rumours, and that is all they are, that Norwegian has sold allocations of seats to various operators way above the number of seats they have, although the operators can give back the unsold ones, but if it turns out to be a good year, there may be interesting times at Gatwick check in desks.

malc_b · 22 February 2015 at 6:32PM

Just make sure you take out insurance that covers you for scheduled airline failure and for 3rd party suppler insolvency. That covers all the bases then (AFAIK).