TENS of thousands of Thomas Cook customers may wrongly think their holidays have been axed, travel companies warn.
When the tour operator spectacularly imploded on Monday holidaymakers were told all future bookings had been cancelled.
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But much of its high street business was as a travel agent — booking holidays with other tour operators.
And those will be honoured.
The problem is these holiday companies don’t have enough information to contact their customers.
Most have only scant details that were passed on to them, such as passenger names as they appear on their passports.
This means the firms have no way of contacting holidaymakers to tell them their trips are still on.
Customers on the other hand may not know which specific holiday company to contact since the information is with the collapsed Thomas Cook.
HOLIDAYMAKERS MAY BE OBLIVIOUS
Calls were growing in the travel industry for Thomas Cook’s liquidator to give operators full details of the people booked with them.
But this may be hampered by data protection laws.
Sean Tipton, of the Association of British Travel Agents, told the Times: “What we really don’t want is a situation where people think their holiday is cancelled and start booking a replacement.
“When they then come to put in their Air Travel Organiser’s Licence [Atol] claim for the first holiday they’ll be told it’s not eligible because it wasn’t operated by Thomas Cook.
“By then it will likely be too late: they’ll either have missed the departure or have two holidays and normal cancellation terms will apply.”
There are understood to be tens of thousands of such bookings.
They are not part of 800,000 Thomas Cook run holidays that have been cancelled.
A further 16,700 customers of collapsed British travel firm Thomas Cook are scheduled to be repatriated today on 76 flights, the country’s aviation regulator said.
The Civil Aviation Authority said it has so far brought back more than half of the total number of affected customers since it launched the country’s largest peacetime repatriation on Monday.
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