TUI refusing to pay back on a 3rd party booking

Johndoran

Applied for our holiday money back via our credit card company. Holiday was for a Shearings river cruise with flights to Munich to pick up the ship. TUI claiming, as Shearings went into administration, they are following their instructions from the administrator for Shearings. Our credit card company now not willing to refund our money. We have the TUI insurance through ATOL. when we booked the holiday. Do we know go  through ATOL or request our money from the credit card company because the booking was not honoured.

D3xt3r5L4b

Go through your insurance 

born_again

If you go via your credit card you will need proof from ATOL that they will not pay out.

When was the holiday booked for?

If you booked the whole tour via TUI, then they should be refunding. It is up to them to then claim from administrators.

phil_solo

OP mentions "TUI insurance through ATOL" - This is not really a thing (or rather it is 2 separate things) Hopefully they have ACTUAL travel insurance as well, as that is probably the best route to recovering the cost of the cruise.

ATOL is an acronym for Air Travel Organiser's License, which both TUI and Shearings have/had, it is not an Insurance Company as such. There is a bonded protection 'scheme' run by the CAA which provides the actual 'ATOL Protection' but you have to make a claim through whichever operator issued you with the ATOL Certificate, which is TUI.

However, the problem the OP has here as I understand it (I am not a lawyer) is that an ATOL Certificate issued by TUI only offers protection under the ATOL scheme in the event of TUI failing, not the 3rd-party supplier, i.e. Shearings. Unless the ATOL Certificate specifically includes the phrase "If [Specialist Leisure Group or Shearings company name] stops trading[...]" then recovery under TUI's ATOL protection isn't possible and you're reliant on the contractual relationship between the consumer, TUI and their 3rd-party suppliers, and any contractual responsibility on the part of TUI to the customer in the event of Shearings failure. Which at best is probably a lengthy delay in getting the cost of the River Cruise back from Shearings administrators to TUI and then passed on to the OP.