UK
Highlights:
* Over 200,000 claims now received
* Approximately two-thirds of the valid claims we received on day one will be paid by the weekend
* The remaining third have been contacted to obtain additional information ahead of payment
* 215,000 valid claims have been received by the
Overall, we have refunded 60% of all valid claims received since the start of this programme, including direct debit payments, totalling
Since
Following a review of the
The payments for these cancelled holidays will be refunded through the ATOL financial protection scheme to those that submitted a claim through our online system, which launched on
This has been a challenging operation, due to the potential threat of fraudulent claims and the poor quality and complexity of the data we received from multiple booking systems used across the
On the opening day of the refund programme, we received 67,000 claims that have been confirmed as valid. We anticipate that by this weekend, around two-thirds of these claims will be paid in full, bringing the total value of refunds made to
While we would like to process refunds as soon as possible, we are unable to make some payments without verifying all aspects of a submitted claim, and therefore the 60-day claims period is paused while we await the required information. This process is in place to make sure the right payments are being made to the right people. We do not expect the requests for further details to cause significant delays to payment once we have received the requested data.
We also encourage consumers that applied for refunds on
'We thank consumers for their ongoing patience as we continue to do all that we can to work through the
'We will have already paid out more than
Notes to editors:
We anticipate that there are up to 300,000 cancelled future holiday bookings in total. To date, we have received around 300,000 claims, and 215,000 of these have been confirmed as valid. The remaining 85,000 are either duplicate claims or invalid claims.
In addition, we fully refunded 45,000 customers who paid for
We also made a further 45,000 automatic direct debit repayments in October, however these consumers also made separate deposit payments, which are being claimed through the usual online system. Claims for these deposit payments are included within the 215,000 figure above.
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