After the collapse of Thomas Cook last month, hundreds of thousands of grounded travellers have to wait another six weeks to get their refunds for their cancelled holidays.
Under the Atol scheme, administered by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)around 800,000 people who had packages booked with the failed travel giant are due refunds under the Atol scheme.
To handle the process the CAA has contracted three expert refund management companies . According to the refunds website they began the process to refund the payments on Monday 30 September and expected to received them within 14 days of this date.
However, there were still some outstanding cases while most of the customers have had their money returned.
Through this method fewer than 200,000 of the disappointed holidaymakers will get refunds by this methods. Those who paid through cash, cheque, credit card or debit card, were unable to apply for refunds until 7 October which was two weeks after Thomas Cook’s collapse.
They were informed that refunds could take up to 60 days.
By early December the refunds process for people who applied as early as they could should therefore finish.
To get the money back some Thomas Cook customers who paid thousands of pounds might have to wait until 2020. This depends on when they had applied for refunds.
The CAA stated that for bookings made by payment methods other than direct debit, directly with travel agents or where flights are with another airline, the refund process will take longer owing to the numerous and complex data processing systems Thomas Cook employed across Europe.
Tags: CAA, Thomas Cook
