Rants | TUI UK Retail Limited and the Great COVID-19 Refund Scandal

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the best in many individuals and organisations. Inspirational acts of bravery, kindness and charity are now commonplace. From postal and delivery workers to front-line checkout and NHS staff, people and companies have really raised their game to support the nation. Exceptional has become the new standard. Mostly.

Unfortunately, some organisations have put the numbers before the optics, allowing short-term fear to destroy their reputations in the long-term. The pandemic has effectively brought the travel industry to its knees, and I was particularly mindful of this when it came to the cancellation of my family’s trip to Disneyland which was to have taken place from 29th March 2020 to 2nd April 2020.

As we had done on previous occasions, rather than book with Disney directly, we booked our trip through TUI at their Hull Superstore. The agent that we booked with was astoundingly hard-working and helpful; she went above and beyond anything that we could have expected to accommodate our (admittedly very specific) requirements. At that point we couldn’t have held TUI in higher esteem.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 our trip was – understandably – cancelled. On 19th March 2020 the Hull Superstore contacted us to say that as soon as a “cancellation invoice” had been received from Disneyland, our refund would be processed. The nation was locked down a few days later and we heard no more.

Under the Package Travel, Package Holidays and Package Tour Regulations 2018 (as amended) then a customer is entitled to a refund within 14 days of the cancellation (in this case 19th March 2020) in the original payment medium. This is a statutory right. However, given the COVID-19 crisis, I waited twice this long before telephoning TUI to chase up the matter, and, when I did, as their pre-recorded greeting advised that they were working through refunds in date order, I felt it best to let them get on with it rather than slow them down by making them field another call. The quality of service that we had received in the Hull Superstore was also at the forefront of my mind and so, despite my anxieties over the money, I resolved to be patient.

As I hadn’t heard anything further by 4th May 2020, I e-mailed the Hull Superstore to chase up our refund. I received an automatic response telling me that the office was closed, and so I called the number on TUI’s website and, after holding for almost an hour, spoke to someone who gave me the devastating news that nothing at all had been done to try and process our refund as the Hull Superstore had been temporarily closed and its staff furloughed. The lady I spoke to told me that as ours was a “third-party booking”, she would have to e-mail one of her colleagues in that team to chase Disneyland for a replacement cancellation invoice, as the original would have been sent to the closed store. Upon receipt of this, she assured me, a BACS payment would be sent immediately.

Several long, frustrating telephone calls later I spoke with a member of staff who, to my relief, immediately took ownership of the matter, even providing me with her direct e-mail address. Unfortunately her helpfulness was not matched by her colleague in third-party bookings and her manager, neither of whom provided the call backs that I had been promised.

It was only following my e-mail of 27th May 2020 requesting details of TUI’s complaints procedure that a manager called me to advise that he had obtained a cancellation invoice from Disneyland. He told me that it was “a two-minute job” for the Finance Team to issue the refund, and that they had already “processed 23,000 refunds”, but he had to send a BACS form to them and it could take up to seven days for them to issue the refund. Not ideal by any means, but reasonable in the circumstances.

The refund did not materialise, though, and so I e-mailed for an update only to find that the manager had misrepresented the position to me when we spoke – the e-mail reply that I received stated that not only would it take the Finance Team an unreasonable “4-6 weeks” to issue our refund, but the manager had yet to even complete the BACS form and send it to them to start that clock ticking. Despite TUI’s admitted failure to even make a defensible attempt to process our refund until late May, they refused to swiftly remedy the situation. I work in the legal sector, and were I or the firm that I work for to fail a client so badly, we would do everything in our power to remedy the situation as soon as possible, and in this case, by the manager’s own admission, the resolution would take someone all of two minutes to execute!

Accordingly, a formal complaint has been made to TUI along with another to ABTA. Trading Standards have also been alerted to the situation.

Were I to hold client money for 82 days following the completion or cancellation of a matter, I’d probably end up being struck off and my principals would face possibly an even bleaker fate. Surely it is now the time for the government to look at imposing such strict regulation on the travel sector to prevent the sort of business practices that I have personally experienced from TUI, and that it seems many others are experiencing too – some of them in extreme financial hardship due to the COVID-19 crisis. Of course, our government is failing us at every turn in matters of life and death, and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it is also failing us on comparatively paltry matters.

If, like us, you were amongst the first to be affected but have not yet been refunded, then my advice is do not be patient - you will only be punished for it by being put to the back of the queue, if you are lucky enough to be in it all. The more noise we all make, the sooner we will have our hard-earned cash back.

Once you have their money, you never give it back.
- The First Ferengi Rule of Acquisition

Update - 25th June 2020
Neither TUI nor ABTA responded to me within the promised timescales (14 days for TUI’s Complaints Team, 28 days for ABTA) and so I wrote to our local MP, Rt Hon David Davis.

Fortunately I’m a practising lawyer – albeit a furloughed one – and have no qualms about pursuing the matter through the small claims court as a litigant in person if need be. However, doing so, particularly in the current crisis, is likely to take even longer than the six weeks from whenever the manager I spoke to deigns to complete a BACS form, to say nothing of the court fees involved, and so for now all I can do is prepare a letter of claim in accordance with the Pre-action Protocol for Resolution of Package Travel Claims and ask TUI to nominate solicitors to accept service of proceedings in the (likely) event that my letter of claim goes unacknowledged within the prescribed period.

Update - 1st July 2020
The refund arrived in my bank account this morning (1st July 2020, 104 days on from the cancellation of our holiday and, suspiciously, just outside TUI’s painful second quarter) without any word at all from TUI, let alone a word of apology. I don’t plan to issue court proceedings to claim the 63p interest that I’ve calculated we’re owed, but, needless to say, TUI have lost my custom - and hopefully anyone else’s who reads this post or speaks to me about them.

Update - 7th July 2020
Rt Hon David Davis has been in touch with me to advise that he has now raised this issue with TUI’s chief executive. Hopefully this will help those still waiting for their money back.