Another week, another financial collapse of a UK travel company – this time the news concerns Kiss Flights, a budget package specialist to Turkey, Spain, Egypt and Greece.
The worrying spate of company closures over recent weeks is being blamed on a number of factors – depending on who you listen to. Reasons vary from reliance on low-margined dynamic packages, consumers not rushing to the hoped for “lates” market, cash flow, etc.
In the UK the situation is increasingly bleak, with two big companies – Goldtrail and Sun4u – going under in the space of a few weeks, and now joined by Kiss Flights. Unfortunately in many cases the communication has either been poor or confusing.
For today’s victim, it was probably both.
After the news first emerged from mainstream news channels such as Sky and the BBC, KissFlights.com inevitably went down.
The site finally emerged an hour or so later with the following, slightly odd homepage.
This was obviously not exactly correct (it still has the same message, nearly four hours after the company officially folded.
Parent company Flight Options managed to get a brief message up on its website, clearly not as high-trafficked as its consumer-facing subsidiary.
Package holiday regulations ensure consumers that booked an ATOL-bonded package holiday are protected in the event of the seller going into administration, thus the redirection to the ATOL part of the Civil Aviation Authority website (regulators of the ATOL scheme).
Problem with the ATOL web service is that, probably for legal reasons, it uses the trading company name, rather than the consumer-facing name, so concerned passengers will be equally confused when arriving at the website.
Information about the collapse of Kiss Flights could only be found by clicking on International Flights Ltd.
Misleading to say the least…
With thousands of passengers either stranded overseas or with their travel plans in disarray, it is down to the CAA to ensure consumers are kept informed – but in a simple, coordinated, logical and meaningful way. Unlike today.
Embarrassingly for the those behind what should have been a simple communication exercise, the only place on the internet where consumers could find any up-to-the-minute information about the situation around Kiss Flights was, inevitably, Wikipedia – updated within minutes of the company’s collapse.
Update: No idea if this Twitter profile for @kissflights is genuine, but a timely and solitary status update.
This is absolutely correct – it is a problem that I have built a business to address. We quickly replace/redirect websites for insolvent companies – we did it for Goldtrail at http://www.goldtrail.co.uk.
I will be contacting the administrators of Kiss once I am able to find out their names.
There’s inevitably going to be a slight disconnect between the media reporting a story with little useful information for passengers and the CAA managing to get the info together, assess what the situation is for those overseas and with forward bookings and publish guidance.
In this case, with hours of the company ceasing trading at 1700 the CAA had issued and published online a press release (at 1915 – less than an hour after Sky started reporting) with a home page and RSS link and then had updates on the ATOL page slightly after that. Even more importantly than that was provision of a fully functional call centre by 2200 that will be taking thousands of calls by now… To give some idea, after Goldtrail failed, the CAA website hit count increased by around 30,000, a slightly lower number than the amount of calls the call centre received.
The CAA also has a Twitter account @UK_CAA that at present does not have many followers.
@nic.
Thanks for commenting…
The point we are making is that the communication is still pretty poor given the circumstances.
1) Surely a failing company should make provision to provide as much useful information to customers as possible (not a holding page that says the site is under maintenance. [NB: This holding page still exists, 14 hours after the collapse!]
2) The CAA site uses legal terminology and official company names (Flight Options, International Flights Ltd etc) on its homepage which have no obvious connection to Kiss Flights, thus confusing already worried passengers even further.
Hi Kevin,
Take your point about the info on the kiss site – I’ll see if I can get anything done about that… And you’re right in thinking the use of the trading name is a legal issue on the ATOL page, as that was the licenced brand, although on the CAA homepage, the news release title does refer to Kiss Flights.
Nic
Hi Nic
I’d be happy for us to put a site up using the Insolvency Point system at no charge. We redirect the site to our own servers so there is no issue with traffic overloading the site. Drop me an email – alex@insolvencypoint.com, or give me a call on 07545 080 613.
We can get this done within a couple of hours. Once the administrators take over we can provide them with access and they can use the site throughout the administration.
Alex
@nic
thanks again.
all this is not for the industry’s benefit, but for the worried folk out there either in-resort or hoping to fly in the coming days and weeks.
anything that can be done to improve the messaging is a good thing.
Thanks Alex – I’ll pass details on to the administrators.
I think it should be a CAA / ABTA requirment that a set message is used even if it just a redirect to the ATOL/ABTA etc site
@nicholas – agree. not a difficult thing to do, one presumes.
Where were the CAA ?
When I last worked in Tour Operating (Aspro then Airtours, prior to my Travelink days) we were terrified of the visits to London to the CAA and the occasional visit from CAA officials to Cardiff.
They had the power to either increase the bond requirement or revoke the entire license – and they have this power because the UK government wants to protect consumers / passengers in the Travel industry unlike other UK industries.
So we should be asking what the CAA thought of the finances of Goldtrail / Sun4U and Kiss Flights prior to their collapse.
Couldn’t agree more.
Every ATOL holder should have a set procedure and information prepared in the event of their collapse, and the priority should be helping customers.