Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. Goodness, it's Thursday the 16th of February.

And I'm glad to be able to welcome back Charlotte Hindle, my colleague who has got a whole lot of questions, Charlotte, about getting your money back when things go wrong.

What are people saying? Yes. I mean, we have,

you know, a lot of people who think that they've paid for something which they didn't actually

get, you know, whether that's extra legroom or whether that's something to do with a hotel or a ferry

or a train. And we've also got people who have been promised refunds, but actually nothing has come through.

And again, it's just very, very difficult to get hold of the organisation, the travel provider

who said that, yes, we will give you a refund and impossible to get them to continue to engage

and actually to get that refund into a bank account.

Well, unfortunately, that doesn't surprise me very much because, of course, as soon as you make

any travel purchase, the organisation has your cash up front and then it is down to you

if you don't get what you deserve to retrieve that cash and they have nothing to be gained from holding onto it,

from handing it back straight away, except, you know, there you get some reputational damage.

However, the evidence seems to be that many of them really don't mind the fact that they're

getting very, very, people are getting upset because it's taking so long.

So it almost seems to me like you are the first port of call when people have got a problem.

A lot of people don't know what actions are open to them.

So I just wondered if you could let me know if they don't contact you, who they should be contacting.

And maybe sort of in what order? Because I know that there's quite a few things that people can do.

Right. If it's a very straightforward thing, so that your booking is cancelled by the provider,

now that will very typically be a plane, an aircraft flight that doesn't take place, or indeed it might be a hotel room where

they've overbooked or something else have gone wrong, then it's very straightforward.

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