The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is still receiving boxes of claims for refunds for XL Leisure Group bookings, nine months after the group collapsed.
The CAA received hundreds of bookings from a single retailer in June, after ABTA challenged the CAA’s forecast number of outstanding claims.
CAA consumer protection group deputy director David Moesli said: “We had a large batch of claims in the last two weeks.” This amounted to 15 boxes containing “a few hundred claims from a large retailer”.
Last month, ABTA suggested the CAA overestimated the outstanding XL claims, and inflated the cost of the collapse by as much as £20 million in its recent consultation on increasing the ATOL levy.
Former head of development for ABTA, Andy Cooper, said: “The CAA assumes there are 16,000 more claims to come. Where are they going to come from? It is difficult for ATOL-holders to keep faith in the credibility of the regulator.”
However, Moesli conceded the CAA figures could be wrong. “We do not expect everything in the consultation to be 100% accurate,” he said. “We will see if we need to change the estimates. We hope to get the right outcome.”
The CAA is not involved in claims resulting from the collapse of Harvey World Travel last month, but Moesli said the fall-out highlights confusion among agents about their legal status and a failure to document transactions adequately.
He said: “Part of the industry has expressed confidence in selling dynamic packages, believing it poses no risk to customers. Evidently, consumers are not getting what they thought.”
However, Moesli excused the CAA from confusion over claims resulting from the failure of Freedom Direct in April.
“We are dealing with packages sold under Freedom Direct’s ATOL,” he said. “Where sales were made as a retailer, they are being dealt with by ABTA. It is relatively straightforward. About a third of the business was ATOL protected.”
Freedom Direct failed with about 10,000 forward bookings.