So..another holiday company bites the dust. Aegean flights and Holidays4u went into administration yesterday causing more grief to people who had booked holidays with them, as well as hoteliers and many others who will lose money owed to them. Thankfully, this time, we are not one of those as we didn’t work with them, though funnily enough their local agent has been asking us for prices for 2012 for a couple of weeks and I finally got round to e-mailing them yesterday! Guess we won’t now be working together.
Some of the news makes me cross though, even if it doesn’t affect us directly. The Daily Mail says: ‘in the past there have been problems with foreign hotels following the collapse of British travel companies. Some have expected customers to pay again for fear they will not get the money owed to them by the travel company.’ The truth is that we are advised to ask for payment which guests can reclaim in the UK, whereas there is NO organization guaranteeing our money and in most cases we DON’T get paid.
When Goldtrail went bankrupt last year they owed us £2500 for guests who had stayed up to that point. We didn’t actually ask anybody to pay extra for their rooms as they were all due to leave within a couple of days anyway. So far, despite filling in several forms and sending copies of all the bookings I have received nothing. The last letter I got from the administrators said they don’t know how much, if anything, we will get or when it might be paid!
We also have had no money for this year's guests from Hotels4u (different from Holidays4u). They are part of Thomas Cook so I hope there is no chance of them going bust, and I think the problem is again with the local agent who gets paid from the UK and then uses our money for as long as they can get away with it. Seeing as we are now half way through the season, I think it is about time they handed some over.
On a brighter note, it was Emre’s birthday on Tuesday. I can’t believe he is sixteen, though he works hard every day on his teenage attitude! Here he is with his cake in the shape of a laptop which was his present (at least half of it was, the other half he had saved).
The boys also had a lovely time yesterday doing a quad bike safari. A friend of mine bought it as a treat for them and it looks like a great trip, especially for teenagers (though Cem and Murat also seemed to enjoy it). They went up into the forest beyond Poppy and rode through streams and up slopes and even went into an old chromium ore mine, which I have never seen. They came back tired and VERY dusty – reminded me of the old days when Cem was doing jeep safari...
