Holidaymakers left confused by operator failure
Comment by Jeremy Skidmore (www.jeremyskidmore.com)
The aftermath of the Leisure Direction collapse has led to some serious questions about what should happen when a company goes into administration.
Alan Potts built up Leisure Direction over 20 years and, in my experience, is a thoroughly decent bloke. He worked his nuts off, ran a profitable company, and was brought down by some accounting issues.
He’s lost his livelihood but unfortunately these things happen. As he himself is big enough to say, ‘at least nobody died’. I’m sure he will be back.
Erna Low and Leger picked up some of the bookings after the company went into administration, which is all fairly normal practice.
But the website was never taken down and within days the administrators had sold it to a company called Entee, who set up Leisure Direction Travel.
Initially (although this has now been corrected), the website carried an ABTA number and the ‘about us’ page claimed that Leisure Direction Travel was one of Britain’s biggest specialist tour operators.
The home page has now got a new search engine but the whole site looks so identical to the original Leisure Direction website that it could be used in a ‘spot the difference’ competition.
After Leisure Direction, the word Travel has been inserted, but the images and pictures are identical.
The Leisure Direction failure did not get much national coverage and there is no question that to the casual observer – which is what holidaymakers are – nothing has changed.
And that’s the intention. Entee is able to cleverly use the goodwill that has been built up over 20 years by Leisure Direction.
No doubt past passengers of Leisure Direction are booking on the site not realising they are buying holidays off a different company. Who knows whether they would still buy if they knew what had happened.
Can this be right? Well, firstly, it is important to state that Entee has done nothing wrong and is perfectly within its rights to act like this. It is not making any false claims on the site.
In fact, you have to give them credit and say that they’ve really been pretty smart and a lot of people will be wishing they’d had the idea to set up Leisure Direction Travel.
The travel business is tough and if you can gain any advantage and stay within the law, then that’s fair enough. So, I’ve got no problem with Entee at all. But I think the system that allows a company to do that is wrong because the bottom line is that some customers will still think they are booking with the old Leisure Direction.
At the very least, the new website should be forced to carry a banner on its home page stating that Leisure Direction Travel has no connection with Leisure Direction, which ceased trading on x date.
What’s your view?
Jeremy Skidmore
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