Protection when booking holiday separate

I may be wrong and others can correct this but if you book a flydrive you are covered by atol - this only helpful if your planning on hiring a car whilst there.

As you have discovered financial protection for travel can be a minefield. If you had bought the flights and car hire from Thomas Cook at the same time it would have been a legal package and protected by the government-backed ATOL scheme which guarantees to return you home if a business fails whilst you are on holiday or provide a refund if the failure happens before you travel.

It appears you just bought the flights directly, on line , from Thomas Cook Airlines, Thomas Cooks could but do not provide ATOL protection for their flight only sales as they are not legally obliged to do so. Only 14 days ago a report proposed requiring all airlines flying out of the UK to be obliged to provide financial protection, 19 European airlines have failed since the start of 2017 alone, but it may be years before this government takes any action to implement the change, so you cannot rely on this happening.

You need to ensure you have scheduled airline failure cover, this may be included in some of the better general travel insurance policies or if you have already got insurance which does not include that cover, buy a separate policy. The biggest supplier is https://www.protectmyholiday.com. and it is worth checking out to see if they will cover your flights, last Friday immediately after the announcement of the loss, they would not cover TC, but they may have changed their mind by now.

If you booked the hotel and theme park tickets with Disney, there is really no risk of them failing but you need to be aware that if you have no flights, Disney would almost certainly still charge you in full for the hotels and tickets and the fact that you paid by credit card would make no difference as Disney would not be in breach of contract.

It is often when things go wrong that the value of a package becomes obvious, as well as financial protection, operators are legally responsible for any accidents illness or injury that you might suffer on holiday and it is always much easier to make a claim in the UK than to have to sue Disney in Florida.

The reality is that it is very unlikely that Thomas Cooks will fail but take steps now to arrange effective insurance so if the worst happens you can limit your losses

I have witnessed at first hand the potential issues when doing a DIY holiday package

We were in a hotel in Malta on a Thomas Cook deal when the Icelandic volcanic eruption grounded flights for several days.

TC kept us in the hotel, same room, same board basis and after 4 days leased a plane from Air Malta to fly everybody home, no cost to us.

A large party from Ireland who went DIY were left high and dry and eventually had to get a ferry to southern Italy, a coach all the way up to the French channels ports, another ferry across to the UK, another coach up to Holyhead to catch another ferry back to Eire - cost was around 1000 Euros per person.