Dynamic packaging travel agency Bookable Holidays is applying for an ATOL following new guidance on what consitutes a package holiday.
Bookable Holidays managing director Jason Dwyer said the new regulations published last month by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform would make it difficult for the agency to advertise its own dynamic packages without an ATOL.
An ATOL would also allow the agency to contract accommodation itself and become less reliant on third-party bed banks, he added.
“It opens up a whole new avenue for us, whereas we have been dictated to by the bed banks in the past. We could start experimenting a bit by getting into flights and hotels,
“If we don’t get an ATOL we are going to give ourselves a headache and we would have to change our website,” said Dwyer.
The agency is in the process of obtaining an ATOL for 25,000 passengers, which it hopes will be in place in April.
The new guidance on what constitutes a package and when agents need an ATOL left a grey area where a retailer sells a flight, room or other service one after another, but separately.
It said an ATOL is required “if an agent offers dynamic packages that include flights” but stated: “The sale of more than one travel service sequentially, for a single payment, need not in principle be a package.”