Travel agent has issued us county court case over refunded flights

silvercar

bagand96 said:

silvercar said:

NJ69x said:

The travel agent has also been sent the court case letter to both my mum and dad separately. My dad paid for the flights was the primary traveller and my mum was the second traveller with no personal purchase from the travel agent.

Is my mum liable in anyway in this case? 

I don’t see how your mum can be liable. If it was an adult travelling with a baby, would they also name the baby? Obviously not.

I would inform the court you are going to defend the claim, ask the court how you counter claim for your costs as the airline didn’t fulfil their obligation by transporting you home on another airline at their expense. I would also mention to the court that the first you heard was this letter. The travel agent should have first written to your parents rather than jump state to court.

I see the logic that the OP should counter claim even if only to test the resolve of the Agent and how far they intend to take it. 

However is counter claiming that the airline didn't fulfill their obligations a good idea given that the case is bought by the agent?  

Yes, in that it shows you intend to fight the claim, which may be enough for the agent to give up. Also, the agent is meant to be acting for the holidaymaker - what effort did they make to provide an alternative flight home? Were they contacting the airline on behalf of their client? Or were they sitting back doing nothing on the premis that they had been paid so they no longer care? You want to make it difficult enough for the travel agent that they think the costs involved in pursuing outweigh the likely return.

you can bet that the travel agent has already tried and failed to get the chargeback overturned with the credit card company, this is another attempt to get their money back.

Pollycat

silvercar said:

Pollycat said:

Asilvercar said:

NJ69x said:

The travel agent has also been sent the court case letter to both my mum and dad separately. My dad paid for the flights was the primary traveller and my mum was the second traveller with no personal purchase from the travel agent.

Is my mum liable in anyway in this case? 

I don’t see how your mum can be liable. If it was an adult travelling with a baby, would they also name the baby? Obviously not.

I would inform the court you are going to defend the claim, ask the court how you counter claim for your costs as the airline didn’t fulfil their obligation by transporting you home on another airline at their expense. I would also mention to the court that the first you heard was this letter. The travel agent should have first written to your parents rather than jump state to court.

That wouldn't be true.

NJ69x said:

Yes we did get a LBA about 18 months ago demanding full payment, we did not respond to the letter.

Given an 18 month gap, I would have expected a more correspondence.

But the OP still can't truthfully say the letter from the court was the first time they heard about it.
Because it wasn't. They received a LBA 18 months ago.

HillStreetBlues

OP, you need to file your defence and the counter claim and  start getting all the documents you can to support your case.
If you don't have the info now, then do a subject access request (SAR) on the payment card at when the chargeback was made. This should give you a copy of all the documents you gave them for the chargeback.
As they are the ones that started court action, it now doesn't matter you hadn't chased the TA for the cost of the new flight before.

EDIT
Also OP  does the TA know you never took original flights home and they had to buy alternative ones?
If they did, I expect this is a bluff on their part hoping they will just pay up or ignore it and lose by default.
 

NJ69x

I called the county court helpline today for more information, they will accept our acknowledgment of service by email and that will give us 14 more days to prepare our defense.

The cost of the counter claim is £70 which in the bigger picture could be worth it if tests the TA's resolve and shows we aren't backing down. In a small claims court case who pays legal costs if the case is lost?

To HillStreetBlues thanks for the advice, I'll contact Barclaycard with a SAR to get all of that information.

To Silvercar the agent made no attempt to help us get an alternative flight home or help in general. We also contacted them for a refund upon return which they declined to deal with which is why we went to the credit card company with a chargeback.

EDIT: yes the travel agent was fully aware we did not use the return flights and that we had to make alternative arrangements to get back.

brianposter

You need to draw up your defence carefully, remembering that the law overrides any T&Cs, and that the law is probably not very clear as to what happens if the TA is uncooperative.

It is however clear that a claim based on the fact that the fare is "non-refundable" is nonsense.

unforeseen

Overall it seems unlikely that a court would overturn a S75 claim as paying the claim is to some extent an admission of liability.

OP has stated that it was a charge back, not a S75

brianposter

Post amended appropriately !

NJ69x

unforeseen said:

Overall it seems unlikely that a court would overturn a S75 claim as paying the claim is to some extent an admission of liability.

OP has stated that it was a charge back, not a S75

I will contact Barclaycard to confirm which of those it was. I assumed it was a chargeback but it could also be a s75 as there was an investigation before the money was refunded. I will find out after new years and update you guys.

Alan_Bowen

First, the good news, even if you lose the judge will not award costs against you in a small claims procedure. Now the bad news, as Bagand96 suggested, you may be in a losing situation here. The agent's responsibility was to book seats with Gulf Air, issue valid tickets and pay the airline for them. They did all that, so there was no breach of contract on their part at that stage. At the start of Covid many airlines just gave up completely, the only one that tried to run a half-decent service from the East was Qatar which was charging an absolute fortune for seats. By requesting a chargeback, the agent has lost everything you gave them, and has paid the airline so they are legally out of pocket.

The problem is your parents booked online with an agency that may save a few pounds but realistically has little time for customer service when things go wrong. Many use an overseas call centre which they virtually closed down during Covid, hence the reason to tell you to contact the airline. A good high street agent would not have done that, all of them worked from home to try and arrange refunds for their customers but online agents in the main did not. I suspect the agency has now worked out every customer who followed your route and is taking action to try and recover their losses so I suspect you are far from the only family in this situation.

By all means, file a Defence and as a counterclaim argue that the agency should have applied on your behalf to the airline for a refund for the return portion of the ticket and failed to do so or offer any assistance whatsoever resulting in a loss of a further £930.

Your real gripe should be with Gulf Air who may well not have acted as perhaps they should but that was the case with virtually every airline worldwide who argued that if they refunded everybody when they should, and the law says within 7 days of cancelling a flight, they would have all gone out of business. 

Unfortunately, they have been able to keep the fare without providing any return flight but whatever you do make sure you file your document within the timescale as I am certain if you do not, they will apply for judgment in default and trying to set aside a judgment isn't easy. If you do file a Defence the case should be transferred to your local county court, which hopefully may be at the other side of the country to the agents, if it is sometimes they give up because of the time and trouble of getting there which makes it uneconomic to proceed further but if your parents address and the agency are close by, then you will just have to wait for the court to issue directions on how to proceed. It may be a long time, the average wait in 2023 reached 52 weeks from the date of issue to the date of hearing but it varies from court to court. Judges also vary, some are great, some regrettably are not and you can't choose!

brianposter

Alan_Bowen said:

The agent's responsibility was to book seats with Gulf Air, issue valid tickets and pay the airline for them. They did all that, so there was no breach of contract on their part at that stage.

Most TAs would like their responsibility to be confined to issuing tickets and paying the airline but, fortunately or unfortunately, the contract does not end there. The system is set up so that obtaining a refund or compensation usually requires that you go through the TA, so that presumably involves an implied term of the contract.

Failure to obtain an appropriate refund would suggest that the implied term of the contract has been breached.