Thomson and First Choice: '100,000 people could be stranded overseas'

Up to 100,000 people who are travelling without insurance protection could be left stranded overseas due to airline failure, according to Thomson and First Choice.

The merged travel companies with over 40 years of travel experience and more staff based around the world than any other travel company made the claim following figures which suggested that as many as 20 million people in the UK travel abroad without insurance annually.

According to a press release from Thomson and First Choice entitled Thomson and First Choice offer holidaymakers 'redundancy cover', published in January 2009, customers who want to make the most of the fantastic early booking offers available on summer 2009 holidays can do so, knowing that if they lose their job and can no longer afford the holiday, their money will be refunded.

When claiming a refund, customers need to show proof of two years employment and that it has been terminated; those claiming will be entitled to a refund of their deposit and of the final balance up to one month before departure.

Emma Waddell, head of PR at Thomson and First Choice, said: "On the protection side, we're not seeing people booking because they are safeguarding their money but we are seeing people looking at and being more concerned about financial protection on holiday.

"If you book a package holiday, you know the holiday is protected, you know there is a government backed scheme which will give you your money back. We are certainly seeing people walking into our shops checking that their money is protected, if anything were to happen.

Research published in December 2008 by Visit London and VisitBritain entitled 'The UK's recession stress buster: Brits spend less on food costs to save for holiday', revealed that 90 per cent of the population now claim they are cutting down on spending, with 45 per cent planning to cut back on holidays, breaks or day trips.

Furthermore, Britons are planning to reduce the amount spent on purchases such as food (80 per cent), fuel (74 per cent), clothes (67 per cent) and entertainment or ‘little luxuries’ (67 per cent).

Another piece of research conducted by greenbee.com, John Lewis Partnership's financial and leisure arm, in a survey of Brits, published in December 2008, revealed that 34 per cent of Brits' key holiday concern is the potential collapse of their travel operator, while 17 per cent worry about getting a poor exchange rate and eight per cent rate lost luggage as their biggest concern.

Ms Waddell added: "We believe that there will still be more companies that will go down but CAA figures suggest that 20 million people in this country will make unprotected travel arrangements this year and we think a million of those could be impacted in some way by their travel company going into administration.

"Now many of those will get their money back through credit card companies but there are potentially up to 100, 000 people who would be left stranded overseas. This is slightly more than the XL incident last year which was so high profile. We do think the whole protection story is very important."