Around 70,000 travellers have been affected after the collapse of Kiss Flights there are currently 13,000 holiday makers abroad with another 60,000 with forward bookings, which are with London-based Flight Options that traded as Kiss Flights. The company, which arranged holidays to Greece, Egypt, Turkey and the Canary Islands, ceased trading on Tuesday. Earlier this month travel company Sun4U collapsed leaving approximately 1,200 customers stuck abroad, most of them in Spain.
For those currently on holiday, the CAA said they would be able to get home on other flights that would be arranged for them and for those who had future booked trips with Kiss Flights they would receive refunds under the ATOL protection scheme.
A spokesperson for the CAA said: “Nobody currently overseas will have their holiday cut short and we don’t expect passengers to experience lengthy delays when they are allocated a new flight. We try to get people home on the same day they are due to travel.”
The London-based Flight Options was launched in 1995 as a small tour operator that offered holidays across the Mediterranean, since then it has bought a number of travel firms including Kiss Flights in 2009.
After the collapse of travel firm Goldtrail last month, it believed Kiss Flights took on a large number of bookings from that which at the time affected as many as 50,000 travellers.
Senior agent, for Top Class Travel in Cheshire Franco Renzulli said: “With the Goldtrail collapse we rebooked all our customers on Kiss Flights and so we have a massive flying problem. It’s going to give the industry a massive headache. It’s in the middle of the school holidays and we’ve got the bank holiday coming up. It’s going to be a nightmare.”
Posted in Travel News