Around 1,200 people are understood to have been affected by the collapse of Airliner Ltd. It was trading under a number of different names, including Luxury Trips, Sporting Getaways, Travelsuitsme and Ultra Cruises, and had 500 forward bookings at the time of its collapse.
Angry consumers on the review website TripAdvisor claim to have alerted industry bodies, as far back as September 2013.
Following the failure, one user stated: “A.B.T.A. [sic] and A.T.O.L. [sic] should be ashamed of themselves for not closing them down two years ago when they had been made aware of their shocking conduct.”
It has since emerged that the company, which became an Abta member on January 17, 2013, was fined £1,600 in late 2013 and received a reprimand by the association’s Code of Conduct Committee for failing to reply to a client’s complaint on time.
One of Airliner Ltd’s brands, Ultra Cruises, was also once a member of cruise body Clia UK and Ireland. It ended its membership in May 2013, although TTG has learned that it continued to display the organisation’s logo on its website until at least September of that year.
A Clia spokesperson insisted: “Use of the Clia logo is only applicable when companies are members,” however she was unable to verify whether checks are made on businesses once they have left Clia.
The CAA estimates that around 99% of Airliner Ltd’s holidays were Atol protected, but at this stage it was unable to specify how much of a hit the Air Travel Trust Fund was likely to take.
The company had a six-month Atol granted in September 2014, and was licensed to carry 1,920 passengers for the period to March 2015.
Quality control
A spokesperson for the CAA said that it did not have the power to oversee the quality of services offered by travel companies. He added that if customers were unhappy, they should first contact the firm in question then, if not satisfied, take the matter to Abta, trading standards or Citizen’s Advice.
An Abta spokesperson told TTG that it encouraged any company that had not been paid money by a member to contact them. “Abta does receive notifications and follows up on all of these - the vast majority of which are resolved in a reasonable period of time. Failure to settle debts may be investigated.
“Notification to Abta should not be regarded as a substitute for good credit control procedures,” he added. “In the case of Airliner [Ltd] a number of debts were notified to us in November and subsequently settled. More recent debts were notified in January, a short period of time before the company failed on 22 January 2015.”
Airliner Ltd was not available for comment.
