TravelUp - Refunds, not answering e-mails phone lines suspended.

veravera123

Personally, I would wait because it is highly likely your trip will be cancelled anyway. I am a little confused as to why you should lose £200 deposit though, you mention security deposit but still does not seem right. Ive not heard that before. Who is your holiday booked with ? 

kiffmoore1

Booked with holiday genie / travelup group. This was I presume the £200 we paid last July to secure the package ( flights/accommodation). They first wrote an email saying that they would offer change of date/destination and I replied saying that as they were ATOL protected and that our family/financial circumstances had changed and I would like a refund, these were there options given. I wasn't aware I would be due a full refund if the whole trip is cancelled by them nearer the time ( almost 100% guarantee I guess, it's only 3 weeks away) compared to these options now so  I wonder whether it's worth me emailing back and suggesting this scenario to them, appreciate any further thoughts, thanks

veravera123

To be honest, the ATOL protection only comes into play if a company goes into administration. However, I am guessing that if you booked your flights and accommodation at the same time with Holiday Genie, then that then counts as a package. If the holiday gets cancelled, which no doubt it will, then you are entitled to a full refund. In many instances, people are only being offered a voucher to book for a later date but what is being offered seems to vary a huge amount. If you are offered a refund credit note, then this gives you the option to rebook at a later date or if that is not suitable, you can ask for a refund. The credit note is just  a way of allowing the agent/tour operator time to obtain refunds from the airline and hotel. If your holiday does get cancelled, you will get a cancellation invoice for Holiday Genie and you may be able to claim on your travel insurance. Possibly will have an excess though but will probably be quicker than refund from tour operator. Hope that helps. Good luck

Life__Goes__On

kiffmoore1 said:

Booked with holiday genie / travelup group. This was I presume the £200 we paid last July to secure the package ( flights/accommodation). They first wrote an email saying that they would offer change of date/destination and I replied saying that as they were ATOL protected and that our family/financial circumstances had changed and I would like a refund, these were there options given. I wasn't aware I would be due a full refund if the whole trip is cancelled by them nearer the time ( almost 100% guarantee I guess, it's only 3 weeks away) compared to these options now so  I wonder whether it's worth me emailing back and suggesting this scenario to them, appreciate any further thoughts, thanks

With option 4 it's what holiday genie least want you to do, so very much doubt e-mailing them will solve anything, as you will be more likely to be pressed into option 1-3

Westin

I think realistically your holiday will be cancelled and Holiday Genie will offer you a credit note.   Whilst you have the right to a full refund that is unlikely to be given or offered in the short term.  The credit note should allow you to convert this to a cash refund at a future date should you not wish to use it to rebook another trip. 

Spogchait

Those experiencing problems with TravelUp or sister companies such as Holiday Genie are not alone at all.  A group has been formed on Facebook and now has over 1000 members, due refunds, not getting any answers, having chargebacks disputed.  Lots of evidence that airlines have refunded TravelUp but they are not passing on the refund in full or at all to the customer.  Search Facebook for TravelUp Covid Response for support.

Pjpern

I have received various flight changes and seat changes from Thai Airways which have lead to overnight stopovers in Thailand on the way to Manila. These were done through a tour company called TravelUp. The flights are for August so no big rush but I would like to cancel as I don't like the idea of an overnight stay in Bangkok airport. I have emailed the company who are obviously inundated with work and I do have travel insurance taken out at the same time as the the flight bookings back in October 2019. Should I just hang on or try to get my money back now or what is the best course of action? Thanks for any help you can give me.

Alan_Bowen

We are facing huge numbers of changes as airlines reduce flights due to a lack of demand. Looking at other comments, TravelUp isn't responding to anyone at the moment, they have an overseas call centre that is probably subject to a lockdown and appears closed so there is little you can do now. In a few weeks things may have calmed down and although you will have to go through Travelup, which won't be easy. it will be worth your while talking directly with Thai to see if there will be other better connections which your agent can then implement. 

tiggerbabe16

We were due to fly to Bangkok on honeymoon with Qatar booked via TravelUp on 30th March (our wedding was due to be 27th March, so we lost that too as lockdown started on the 23rd).  I started to try contacting them during that week, and on the day before we were due to fly after no response to several emails, I finally got through to a queue on their phone line on Sunday 29th March.  As I had been trying to get through on the phone all week, I wasnt losing my place for anyone - I was on hold (without speaking to anyone) for 2hrs 3mins before I realised that the number I was calling was not going to be included in my free minutes on my mobile!  The call cost me £79 and I never even spoke to a living person!  They shut their phone lines down the following day, so I want proof from them that the phone line i was on, was actually operational or i will be claiming them for £79 too!  Today, I am still waiting on any form of personal contact back from TravelUp over a month later!  Our flights cost us just under £1k, money we could be doing with having back, Qatar Airways are offering refunds, vouchers or rearranged flights, but I cant do anything until I hear back from TravelUp :-(  We got an updated email a week or so ago saying that they had over 100k enquiries and had but that point dealt with 13k of them, and were dealing with queries in departure date order and they were approaching the end of March departures at that point.  We were due to fly on 30th March, but have not heard a thing further than that.   Beware with them rearranging your flights too, if you check the dates you want to go with Skyscanner youll find that quite often Travelup will be offering the cheapest a flights, but if you run a search on TravelUps own website (the price it will use for your rearranged flights) it will come in significantly higher than your Skyscanner quote - even though if you were booking the flight for the first time via Skyscanner you would get the lower price!  It’s absolutely ridiculous and another reason why I want to actually SPEAK TO SOMEONE and not do anything via email as I wont be overcharged for my rearranged flights by men in masks :-(

tiggerbabe16

Spook!  Literally just had this from TravelUp!
Dear Aileen

Firstly, I would like to thank all our customers for their patience and understanding in this unprecedented period.

I appreciate your frustration of not being able to physically speak to a member of our team due to the strict lockdown of all our offices across the globe and I appreciate each customer has a unique set of circumstances.

As a large proportion of our bookings are made online and have no human interaction we do have minimal resources which in normal circumstances means that we are in a position to offer some of the lowest fares in the market to which our customers can benefit from.

It does however leave us with a problem when a Global pandemic attacks. For all our desire to increase our team members this is not practical while the globe is currently locked down and a large proportion of our non-customer facing team are on furlough.

The limited team we are utilising are currently working from home, yet having a collective experience of over 200 years in the travel industry highlights that we feel they are best suited to handle this matter on your behalf.

I am incredibly proud of our limited team who are doing everything possible to service our customers even in the face of abuse and threats from a limited group of individuals. It seems that the #bekind does not always apply.

I feel our biggest challenge now is twofold – the sheer volume of customers affected and the spread of misinformation.

The team have seen a significant increase in enquiries and contacts, we are currently operating at an increased level of over 900% per month to which we have responded to over a third of these enquiries.

Unfortunately, as is human nature in a time of panic, some of our customers are seeking to remedy the situation themselves by contacting the airlines directly, asking for assistance with advertising partners and raising chargebacks with their card issuers to try to reclaim their money.

This is essentially quadrupling our workload as we have then had 4 separate enquiries running for each customer. The time we are spending providing the same information to each of these parties is taking time away from responding to other customers who need our help which in turn exacerbates the problem further. Unless this cycle changes there will continue to be a delay in our responses.

We are also struggling with the airlines customer service agents giving information to you, our customers that are not aware of our commercial relationships. They are advising our customers that we have already been refunded for their tickets but not explaining the timescale of this process and the settlement terms that come with it. This seems to be causing the most issues as our mutual customers now believe we have their money but are ignoring their contacts to avoid reimbursing them. This could not be further from the truth.

The fact is a refund request which is approved on the 1st of the month only gets settled via the billing settlement plan on the 1st of the next month which in normal circumstances takes us a couple of weeks to recheck the amount authorised and reconcile it correctly to enable us to refund our customers. However since the pandemic there are now 93 airlines including the world’s major international carriers that have withdrawn all travel agents access across the country to process refund applications through the normal means of the global distribution systems which over the years, travel agents like us have integrated with to make the refund application process semi-automatic if not fully. Instead the travel agents are forced by these carriers to adopt another system which is not designed to process such a quantity of refund applications which is time consuming, labour intensive and complex where a separate form has to be filled with each and every passenger in the booking with correct fare and taxes breakdown and the so called airlines waiver codes in order to process the refund applications. I am pleased to report that the applications which we were able to submit in the month of March are now settled in accordance with the billing settlement plan and we are actively processing those refunds/airline credit vouchers.

The Travel Industry as a whole was not prepared for an event of this magnitude. Companies, systems and infrastructure were simply not designed for an effective worldwide lockdown and we hope valuable lessons will be learned by all, ourselves included.

Since we continue to receive new bookings where the airlines are loading the flight schedules in the global distribution systems and subsequently cancelling as the pandemic continues and refusing refunds via the same point of sale therefore we placed such carriers on stop sale for the departures until 31st August 2020. The change in terms and conditions for any new bookings were to be transparent to our customers who continue to book with us for their future travel arrangements.

Our Terms and Conditions originally stated that the customer was entitled to a full refund of what we receive back from the airline or supplier. This will never be the same as the amount you have paid us when you booked as this includes our service charges and we appreciate this has led to some customer confusion.

For those customers where the airlines are only offering vouchers, we cannot stress enough that the monies have been paid in full to the airlines who currently hold those funds despite their assurances to the contrary. We would like to assure our customers that we are doing our best to help them retrieve their hard-earned money in the shortest time possible.

For all other existing bookings which are affected due to Covid-19 there is a contribution of £50 per booking that covers the service you have already received and continue to receive in accordance with market practice however this fee is waived off should you decide to accept a credit note of your full booking value to exchange against your future travel arrangements.

Our policy has been driven by the airlines who have released varying policies as the pandemic has unfolded and anybody affected by our previous guidance will be contacted by our customer service department when we are back operating with a full team and new enquiry volumes drop to discuss further options available to them. However, our priority is to contact those customers that we are yet to update.

I would again like to thank all our customers for their continuous support and understanding of the current predicament and would call upon your assistance in bringing those airlines to task that are making it increasingly impossible to achieve your refunds. In the meantime, we continue to process the refunds and vouchers that are being made available to us.