Senior figures at Freedom Travel Group and Thomas Cook have acknowledged a problem with delays to tour operator payments and pledged to fix the issue within days.
Alison Holmes, head of the Freedom consortium and Co-operative Personal Travel Advisors (CPTA), told the group’s joint conference in Glasgow at the weekend: “We’ve had our challenges.”
Referring to a report late last month of delays to tour operator payments, Holmes said: We are supposed to ensure tour operators get paid. We will get it sorted. We can’t have tour operators on stop sell. You have my assurance we will do everything to sort this out.
“Not all our members have had this challenge, but I accept patience is running out.”
Holmes declined to give details but she told Travel Weekly the most serious payment delay lasted half a day. She denied a report that there have been payment problems for two years, insisting: “There have not been any issues until the last couple of months.”
She added: “Probably about one third of Freedom members have been affected.”
Holmes said: “It is an issue for the business. It has to be sorted within the next two weeks and it will be. We cannot go into the New Year with this.”
Freedom Travel Group and CPTA members run their own businesses but their management services are provided by Cook.
Thomas Cook blamed the issue on a technical hitch. However, Travel Weekly understands the problems stem from a recent switch of outsourced payment provider by Thomas Cook. Payment processing has been outsourced for some time, but Cook recently moved from one offshore company to another.
Addressing the Freedom-CPTA conference via a video, Thomas Cook Co-operative Travel commercial director Paul Hemingway acknowledged tour operator payment was “an area causing pain”. He said: “Suppliers have not been paid on time.
We have huge resource dedicated to this and we are fixing the problem, because a seamless back office is essential for you.”