Finding out that your travel company has gone out of business must be a very unpleasant experience. Statistically it is unlikely to happen to you, however unfortunately, each year thousands of people receive this unwelcome news. Knowing that your holiday is cancelled is bad enough, but if you hear that you may also have lost your money, it’s a very unpleasant double whammy.

On 4/1/17, the customers of All Leisure Holidays Ltd had the shock of hearing that their cruise trips on the company’s two ships, the Minerva and the Voyager, would not be going ahead. However, they also had the reassuring news, that as the cruise companies were ABTA Members as well as having ATOL licences, they would be guaranteed a full refund of their money.

Most UK based cruise companies are ABTA Members and where there is no flight involved, it will be ABTA’s responsibility to ensure that all customers are fully refunded, if any of these companies go out of business. ABTA agents will also be in full swing, looking for alternative travel arrangements free of charge so that their  customers can avoid further disappointment.

A travel company failing may be relatively rare, but sub-standard holidays or poor customer service are, unfortunately, often much more of a day to day reality.

To minimise the likelihood of this happening if you book with one of our Members, as well as giving clear guidelines on how to deal with problems when they do occur, ABTA has developed a detailed Code of Conduct which all of our Members have to follow.

The Code’s main purpose is to ensure that you will not encounter issues, but if you do, we will if needed, take action against our Member to ensure it does not happen again. For any problems that you have not been able to resolve with your ABTA travel company, you can use our dispute resolution scheme, which is quicker and cheaper than going to court. 

ABTA also does a lot of important work behind the scenes working with destinations and suppliers improving health and safety and helping to make their services more sustainable. We have also have put together world-class industry guidelines on incredibly important issues such as animal welfare and ensuring that volunteering trips are truly worthwhile for everyone involved.

We do all of this work because both ABTA and our Members passionately care about the industry we work in and we want to do everything we can to make sure that it has a positive impact on everyone and everything it touches, especially you, our customers, so that you can truly - Travel with confidence.