Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 8th of May, a public holiday, which means it's a great day to talk about holidays and flights that don't go perfectly well. And I'm delighted to be joined by my colleague, Charlotte Hindle, who is going to bring some of the questions which crop up

quite a lot when people are unhappy about the way they have been treated by a travel organisation.

Hello Charlotte. Yeah, hi. Yeah, so we're getting lots and lots of queries from people. They've got problems. They have tried contacting,

you know, the company is either the tour operators or most likely sort of the airlines.

Airlines haven't been getting back to them very much so. The online, mostly online travel agents haven't been getting back to them, but

they still think they've been badly treated, that they are owed money, they're out of pocket,

and they want to know what they can do, where can they go. So, you know, at the moment they've come to you,

but you're, you know, you're just one person.

And there must be lots of other places where they can go to try and get some type of sort of justice. And I thought it would be a really good idea today to have a look at all the places

where you can go and just try and assess how useful those places are going to be.

So say you have done everything that you can to contact the organisation

and either you haven't got what you wanted from them

or you think that it's an unfair judgment,

or maybe they just actually haven't got back to you at all,

which is mostly what we're finding.

What do you do next, whether it's an airline, whether it's a tour operator?

Well, it is very, very frustrating.

Now, if it happens to be a member of Abta, the Travel Association, then it's very straightforward.

Because they, if it's a member, their members are expected to respond in a reasonable time.

And if they don't, they get fine.

So you just tell Abta, oi, this member isn't behaving properly.

And they will most definitely look into it.

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