Leading companies insist the difficulties in paying cash refunds to customers in the first months of the pandemic have been resolved.
Tui UK and Virgin Holidays were among operators identified by the regulator, the CMA, as taking too long to refund clients.
Richard Sofer, Tui UK commercial director, said: “The challenge we had was down to the fact we had so many customers and never expected to have to deal with that many in such a short period. It wasn’t that we were delaying payment. We were physically unable to deal with the volume.
“In the space of two to three days we pretty much had to build new systems to deal with requests online.”
Sofer told a Travel Weekly Insight Report launch event: “We had to hold our hands up. It wasn’t as good as we expect of ourselves. But we learned a lot along the way and there are no challenges going forward.”
He added: “There weren’t a great deal of cancellations or refunds with the most-recent lockdown, but we were able to refund all those [who wanted a refund] within 14 days.”
Lee Haslett, head of global sales at Virgin Atlantic, said: “We were caught completely off guard by the huge volume of refunds we had to process. We’re thankful for the patience of customers and partners. We completed the backlog in November, but it was a real challenge. The industry in general wasn’t set up for these times.”
Barrhead Travel president Jacqueline Dobson agreed: “The situation is under control now. Initially it was the sheer volume of funds. We had thousands and thousands of bookings affected.
“We had all our stores closed and if a customer paid with a credit card in store, you can’t refund that online. You need a PDQ [point-of-sale card] machine. That is where we found real difficulty. We built a system that was able to bulk refund customers.”
Dobson stressed the importance of “keeping in communication with customers”, explaining: “We spoke to every customer one to one, whether by phone or when we opened our stores, explaining why refunds were slower, that we had to wait for refunds from suppliers. In normal times we would just refund the customer, but in these circumstances we could not do that.”