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Vantage Travel Bankruptcy with Michelle Couch Friedman

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“The only way to get money back from a bankrupt company is through your credit card company if you paid with one, or if you have travel insurance.” - Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

Imagine booking a vacation only to find out that the company files for bankruptcy a week later. As a consumer, would you know what your rights are? There’s a big difference between travel insurance and travel protection. One can leave you with no way to get your money back.

Today’s guest is Michelle Couch Friedman. Michelle is the founder and CEO of Consumer Rescue. She is an experienced consumer reporter, advocate, mediator, author, and licensed psychotherapist. Michelle has also been a columnist, contributing editor, and former executive director for Elliott Advocacy, a non-profit organization dedicated to consumer advocacy.

“You want to get your travel insurance away from the company who is taking you on the tour.” - Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

Show Notes:

“Scammers come out when they see a pool of victims somewhere. Scammers want to get a piece of that and they will figure out how.” - Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

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Links and Resources:

Transcript:

Michelle, thank you for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast.

Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Glad to have you back. Can you remind the audience about who you are and what you do?

I’m Michelle Couch-Friedman. I am the CEO and founder of consumerrescue.org. We are a consumer advocacy organization. We help customers of companies. We mediate problems between businesses and consumers. We do that free of charge.

I also write articles about those cases, so that we can help more than just one person. Each time we solve a problem, there’s some lesson in that problem, usually. Then we publish articles about those battles, the mediation process, how it went, what could have been done differently that could have avoided the problem, and the lesson we should take from the case.

I also publish a weekly newsletter that has additional tips and little other things that I’m doing, like this, like the Easy Prey Podcast. That’s basically what we do. My team and I are always available to solve problems for consumers.

We also have a service that if you want to do it yourself, we have Ask Meera, our research director, and over the years, she has accumulated all sorts of customer-facing contacts. If you need a real person to speak to, you can contact Meera, and she will provide you the name and contact of somebody we know has a history of helping consumers. And that’s also free of charge.

That’s really cool. What got you interested? What got you to start consumerrescue.org?

I was originally a therapist, and I like helping people. I was an advocate. About eight years ago, I started volunteering at a nonprofit that does the same thing. I then became the executive director of that nonprofit.

I ran that organization for about six years, and when my service to that nonprofit came to an end, I just naturally decided to start my own organization, and my team came with me.

Oh, that’s awesome. What is the story that we’re talking about today? You and I were talking about it before we started recording. Why don’t you give an overview of the story here?

Today, we’re going to talk about how consumers can avoid becoming victims of a bankrupt tour operator. Really a bankrupt anything. There are very similar steps to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. Last year, we had a major tour operator go out of business. On the day it went out of business, it owed $110 million to customers.

 

That company, Vantage Deluxe World Travel, had been in business for 40 years. The customers were really loyal and they were really blindsided by this announcement that it was bankrupt. All tours were canceled, and their money was going down with the ship.

That’s what I’ve been primarily covering for the last year, is helping, because this particular bankruptcy impacts nearly 10,000 people. As you can imagine, many of these customers have never been involved in a bankruptcy before.

What we’ve been doing, my team and I, during the last year, is helping to educate the customers that can receive refunds how to do that. The only way to get a refund from a bankrupt company is to get it back through your credit card company if you pay with a credit card, or if you had travel insurance that covered insolvency.

The only way to get a refund from a bankrupt company is to get it back through your credit card company if you pay with a credit card, or if you had travel insurance that covered insolvency. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

The majority of people, the customers did not have either of those conditions because as many tour operators do, they offered discounts to customers if they would pay with a bank transfer. Many of them saved a small amount, but really that decision to pay with a bank transfer led to the total loss of the funds that they spent on these tours.

How much time was there from when the bankruptcy became public and some of these tours are supposed to happen?

Well, the company, Vantage Travel, was selling tours right up until about six days before they announced their bankruptcy. They were on a selling blitz. They had fired almost all of their employees except for their sales team at the end. They went on a sales blitz, offering all sorts of great deals to foreign lands: “Go to Egypt for $3500 for two weeks with business class airfare and hotel, and food included.”

Of course, that trip was never going to happen. The people that took advantage of the offer didn’t know, and they thought this company that they had known for many years was just offering a spring sale. This blitz went on for about six weeks before they fired even their sales team. What they were doing was they were trying to convince the buyer that even with all the negative publicity, there was still value in the company.

In six weeks, they sold $2 million worth of trips that of course were not ever going to happen. They did prove that their customer list still had value, then another company came in and bought the customer list. But now we have 10,000 customers that are left without a trip and without their money.

For these specific trips, how long from the time that the bankruptcy happened to when the trip was supposed to disembark? Also, some of them were just next week or something like that?

This was a very active tour operator. They were taking people on trips or scheduling trips several times a month. They had a few ships that they leased. Some were river boats, others were ocean boats. These were just ongoing, but in the end, there was a high number of cancellations as we got closer and closer to the date that they finally fired everybody.

The employees were contacting me early on—months before—with their concerns that something was wrong, that they weren’t revealing what was the problem, but that there were operational issues that were canceling a lot of trips. Well, the operational issues were that their ship got taken away from them for nonpayment of the leasing fees, and they didn’t have the money to operate the tours.

Vendors started contacting me and saying that they were owed half a million dollars from unpaid bills from this company and they were continuing to take the work because they were being told that next month we’ll pay you. This went on and on and on. When the final blitz was over, they had dug themselves into a $170 million hole. This is stunning.

Wow. The challenge is, I think with Vantage, is because they were an established cruise line with 40 years of history, that the consumers really would not have had any reason to suspect that they might be going out of business.

I know the opposite of that, in late 2023, there was a brand new cruise line called Life at Seas Cruises, that spun up this big three-year cruise plan. They didn’t have a boat by the time it got down to it.

They had a boat, but it was not done. I don’t know how far it was even that they didn’t have a crew either. So even they got the boat, they still didn’t have the crew either.

I think if you’re a consumer, you can look at that and say, “OK, this is a brand new company. Maybe I should be a little bit suspicious.” But with a company that’s been around 40 years, were there any signs that the consumers could have been able to see coming up to this?

The problem was the pandemic. The type of warning signs you would say, “Wow, that’s a red flag,” was happening across the board in the travel industry because the pandemic shut down the travel industry, basically, for a certain amount of time.

Frequent cancellations obviously would be a warning sign to consumers like, “Hey, maybe I don’t want to use this company.” But because of the pandemic, frequent cancellations were…

That was the norm.

That was the norm, right. There were then later warning signs that I think some consumers recognized, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it because they received credits in the pandemic for a future cruise, so they had to use this company.

They were already locked into that situation, which was problematic because then also Vantage said, “OK, well, you can move to this new trip, but it’s going to cost you another $3000. There are some add-ons, or now the prices are different because you booked this in 2019,” so they had to invest more money.

They were trapped because they had to continue down that path because they were already on the path. They had, in some cases, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 in travel credits. So they were backed in a corner in a way.

But then there were other consumers who just weren’t aware of anything. They knew the Vantage name, they had traveled with the company in the past, and they didn’t bother to check and see, “Are there any news articles,” which they were starting to pile up from 2021?

I was on a news program out in San Francisco discussing the problem with Vantage in October 2021, that there were big warning signs because everyone else was coming out of the pandemic. For some reason, this company didn’t seem to have gotten the memo that the pandemic’s over now, so you can start regularly providing your customers with their trips.

They were still canceling, they weren’t refunding the customers that they owed money to. This particular tour operator was selling a pricey, it’s not travel insurance, it’s a travel protection. Now, I like to call it travel insurance because it didn’t have an underwriter. It was a program that was self-funded by the company, so if it went out of business, you’re out of it. Nothing can be done. There’s no underwriter. There’s no safety net.

A lot of the customers didn’t realize that that’s what they were buying. They thought they were buying a travel insurance policy that would cover them under all circumstances. A lot of consumers don’t understand travel insurance. So this was an education in travel insurance for a lot of the customers that were stuck in this bankruptcy.

The refunds that were owed to a great deal of those customers coming out of the pandemic were people who were approved for a travel waiver payment, because they got sick before the trip, someone died. It was a pre-tour cancellation policy. The company would get this approved claim and then they would say, “OK, well, we’re going to pay you back, but we don’t know when.”

That’s not how travel insurance works. Travel insurance, once you get an approved claim, you could probably expect to get your payment in the next 10 days, maybe quicker, because there are specific laws. It’s a highly regulated industry, but a travel waiver or a travel protection doesn’t have those same restraints.

They were selling a very expensive…some of these consumers spent $2500 on travel protection that was absolutely worthless if the company didn’t have the money to pay the claim. And that’s what happened here.

Is the advice to consumers that if you’re looking for travel insurance that you make sure that you’re getting that from outside of the company that you’re actually going with, whether it’s a cruise or an airline or whatever, that you’re getting the insurance outside?

This isn’t particularly unusual. There are other tour operators today that it’s part of your package. They will sell you a tour and then say, “Now you need travel protection.” You don’t want to spend $20,000 on a tour and have no travel protection, because it’s not allowed to call it travel insurance, so they would call it travel protection. Then they say, “So for an additional $2500, you’re protected pre and post during the tour.”

I have told many, many consumers and I’ve written articles about it. You want to get your travel insurance away from the company that’s taking you on the tour. You don’t want to be insured by somebody who has no underwriter. If they go out of business, your money is going with them, and even if you’ve invested in this travel protection, it means nothing if the company can’t afford…

You want to get your travel insurance away from the company that’s taking you on the tour. You don’t want to be insured by somebody who has no underwriter. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

If they’re $110 million or $170 million in debt, there’s nothing for you. You’re not going to get any protection. It’s the opposite of protection. It’s unprotection. And it was pricey. I’m familiar with travel insurance policies, and the protection that was sold was pricey for what it provided. For some people, it was completely worthless in the end.

You were saying earlier that even if people had insurance, that not all insurance even covers the tour operator going out of business?

Yeah, that’s the problem too. Now you’ve gone to a travel insurance company and you’ve done what you should do, get an actual travel insurance policy, but if you don’t have an insolvency clause in that policy, you’re not protected.

A travel insurance policy is meant to protect you from your own cancellation. These policies are named perils policy. There will be specific things: This is what you’re protected against. You’re protected if you get sick and have to cancel. You’re protected if someone in your family gets very sick. You’re protected if there’s a death in your family. It will list 12 different things.

In many policies, an exclusion is if your tour operator goes out of business or whatever. To be protected from a bankrupt company, you must have a clause in that policy that says you’re protected for the insolvency with or without bankruptcy or you’re not protected.

To be protected from a bankrupt company, you must have a clause in that policy that says you’re protected for the insolvency with or without bankruptcy or you’re not protected. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

In the end, about a month before this particular company declared bankruptcy, it was clear that they were bankrupt. We were just waiting for the announcement. First, they said they were victims of ransomware. I don’t know if this really happened or not, but all the major news organizations reported it, and that was the reason that they were canceling all these trips. There was never any other follow-up about what happened in that ransomware—that was in April.

Then in May, they started the sales blitz and people were buying these tours at great prices. Some people did buy travel insurance from outside of the tour operator, and they were able to file a successful claim because there are policies that said, “Yeah, that we protect against insolvency with bankruptcy.”

Then in the next month, when the bankruptcy actually was announced, they weren’t covered because now the travel insurance company said, “Well, your policy ended on the day that the trip was canceled.” The trip was canceled in May and they didn’t file for bankruptcy until June.

Now, I’m a consumer advocate, so I took a bunch of these cases. I went back to the companies and I said, “Look, you know that this company was insolvent. There’s no way they gathered up $110 million in debt for their customers in one month, and that’s what caused them to….”

A lot of these people did get their claims pushed through. It’s kind of the same way with credit card disputes. You’ve got an adjuster that’s just looking at the facts on the paper, and they will not dig in really deeply to see what’s really going on here.

Consumers, especially if you’re booking a very expensive trip, make sure you get travel insurance away from the tour operator, and make sure that you can find a clause in there that says you’re protected against the insolvency of the tour operator with or without bankruptcy. That way, when you can see that the final pass towards bankruptcy, if your trip is in that little window, you’ll still be protected because they’re insolvent.

Insolvent means that they haven’t been able to operate their trips because they don’t have enough money to pay their bills. That’s not hard to prove when you see a pattern of trips being canceled and news reports are starting to surface, like employees were sending me internal memos and stuff. I was sending it to The Boston Globe, and my contact over there was publishing it. So it’s very clear that the company was insolvent.

That’s what you want to make sure, that you have in your travel insurance policy, that you’ll be protected from the insolvency of the company with or without official bankruptcy.

Is this also the sort of thing that most credit card companies would cover if the company goes out of business? You can dispute the charge because, “Hey, I never got the service”?

If you paid with a credit card, yes. I thought maybe we’re talking about the travel insurance that you’ve got a basic travel insurance policy and very rarely would you be covered by an insolvency clause and that type of policy.

A credit card dispute is something you should absolutely be able to do if the tour operator is not able to provide the goods and services as agreed upon at the time that you made the charge. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

A credit card dispute is something you should absolutely be able to do if the tour operator is not able to provide the goods and services as agreed upon at the time that you made the charge. The problem with cruises, sometimes people will book—it’s not unheard of to book a cruise two years ahead. If you’ve made a payment two years ago, there are limits when you can dispute a charge.

In general, the clock is supposed to start ticking for you to be able to file a dispute based on the date of the service, not on the date that you made the first payment. If you made a payment in, let’s say, last January and your trip is within two years—I would say you probably are—you’re pushing the limits at about two years because Visa and MasterCard, the parents of credit card disputes, have a limit of, I think, 520 days from the day of the charge, even if the date of the service hasn’t even occurred yet.

A lot of the Vantage customers, because their original trip was in 2020 and got canceled because of the pandemic, some of the original credit card charges happened in 2019 or 2020. But then we have lots of people who are caught in the blitz at the end and use their credit cards and bought tours in May.

Then also, even when all the employees were gone, the automated system still was accepting payments. People made payments that weren’t aware of the bankruptcy on existing phantom trips that aren’t going to happen. They were making payments through the system right up till the end.

And then those who actually paid with wire transfer, they were just out of luck entirely.

In general, it’s true that a bank transfer is never reversible unless the receiving bank agrees to send it back.

This particular case was a little bit different. A traveler should never depend on this happening because I haven’t seen this very often, but because of that blitz at the end, a lot of credit card companies or banks did find that to be, I want to say, fraud. If there’s fraud involved in a wire transfer situation and the banks have access to the other bank, say you’re both at the same bank, we did see some of those bank transfers being reversed.

The receiving banks also went along with it because they didn’t want to be involved in the last two months where they knew that they were bankrupt, and that was revealed in court on the first day of the bankruptcy hearings. They knew they were going bankrupt, and they were going to need to file bankruptcy.

That sales thing was purely to prove that they had value, to get a buyer to come in and buy this customer list that is over three million people. Only 10,000 of those have been injured by this bankruptcy, so there is value with that list.

You should always pay with credit cards. Don’t try to save $500 to save yourself this $500, but then you have no protection. The Fair Credit Billing Act only protects consumers that are using credit cards. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

You should always pay with credit cards. Don’t try to save $500 to save yourself this $500, but then you have no protection. The Fair Credit Billing Act only protects consumers that are using credit cards. They don’t protect you. What a lot of consumers don’t understand is there is no purchase protection with a bank transfer. That’s not what a bank transfer is set up to be. You shouldn’t be shopping straight from your bank.

It is very similar to Zelle. You’re just sending your money off and you can’t reverse it. You can’t ask for it back. You don’t get what you wanted out of what you say you were sending the money for. You have no protection.

What a lot of consumers don’t understand is there is no purchase protection with a bank transfer. That’s not what a bank transfer is set up to be. You shouldn’t be shopping straight from your bank. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

If the company is completely bankrupt, even though that money might be sitting in an account somewhere, you can’t just reach in and get it because now the company is bankrupt and the judge will say, “All the money is frozen right now. You can’t do that. You can’t extract any money out.” So it’s always safer for consumers to use a credit card when they’re making big purchases.

I know with this particular case, there appear to be a bunch of scams that have come out as a result of this, of the company going bankrupt. Can we talk about some of the scams that have come out that are targeting either those that were aware of the bankruptcy or even those that weren’t aware of the bankruptcy?

As a scam expert, the scammers come out when they see a pool of victims somewhere. The scammers want to get a piece of that, and they want to figure out, “Well, how can I get some of that?”

The first scam that blew out of this was the people who had valid credit card disputes. They made their payments in January 2023 and their trip was supposed to go in October 2023, and the company is now bankrupt. They should be able to easily get their money back from the credit card company.

I’ve never seen a bankrupt company ever before file a challenge to a customer’s dispute. This is what happened here. A lot of the Vantage customers filed. They figured they’re safe. They’re like, “Good thing I didn’t make a bank transfer. I paid with the credit card, and I’m going to be able to file a dispute.”

Next thing you know, there are bizarre letters that say Vantage Travel responded, they say that your trip is still going, and that you’re gaming the system. I published some of the letters on Consumer Rescue. The letters are anonymous. They say that the company is not out of business. They had a phone number at the bottom that the customer should call to reschedule their trip. It’s poor grammar, the whole thing.

So over a course of several weeks, I was receiving complaints from all sorts of customers who had different banks. It was Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and all of them were getting very similar or slightly different but the same blank, no-header, nothing, just an anonymous letter.

Someone filed a dispute and the rebuttal that was supposed to be coming from Vantage came from the new company that bought the customer list. But that company has nothing to do with it. Somebody took the header off of an invoice, pasted in the name of the new company in this thing, and said that, “This is not a valid credit card dispute.”

This was the next step of the scam. Someone sat down with a piece of paper, pasted a thing for a cruise that was operated by Vantage, but now miraculously became a cruise that was from this new company.

Luckily, I have very nice people that I know at all these banks. They started an investigation and realized, “Yeah, this is some scammer.” We don’t know exactly what the end point was supposed to be. I assume it was going to be to call this number that was on the bottom of some of these and somehow extract money from these people.

The clientele of Vantage Travel is considerably older. The average age over 65, they’re not internet-savvy, and they could have been fooled by something like that. I just started publishing articles to try to get the word out, and that seems to have caused this letter to stop appearing.

We started having a lot more success with the credit card disputes. The more I published those articles and the more that the bank saw that something’s not right here, somebody along the way. I spoke to the attorney for Vantage Travel and he assured me that that letter is not coming from Vantage. Vantage doesn’t even exist anymore.

We don’t really know what that was about, but we did know that it went on for months and it went on to multiple banks. I don’t know if somebody hacked into their email address or who knows. Somebody was intercepting these, causing consumers who had valid credit card disputes to lose their valid credit card disputes.

Some of these people had $26,000 on the line. We got involved in that and anybody who contacted me got their money back through the credit card disputes. That was one of the scams that burst out of that.

The other one was customers, when there’s a bankruptcy, they get put onto a claim list. They’re claimants. They have to fill out their information and how much they’re owed. In some cases, they’ll have their address. Scammers go to these warehouses and they start mining the victim list of this bankruptcy to victimize them again.

Letters started appearing from the company called Stretto. Stretto is a warehouse of bankruptcy documents. If the judge signs an order, it’s uploaded to Stretto. You can go there and you can find all the information you need to know about the company that you’re claiming to. It’s a great service.

It’s also public. Scammers know that. They go to these victim lists, then they start contacting them, offering them, telling them news that isn’t true. This particular scam was they took the Stretto letterhead, created a letter, and said that the good news of you got 24 hours to accept this great deal.

You’re not going to get any of your money back, but if you press this button here, right here, and you do it by the end of the day tomorrow, you’re going to get 50% deposited right into your account, and then you’ll be done. Then you’ll be removed from the bankruptcy list, and that’s the best you can expect to get. “Don’t dawdle because this is only good….” All the signs of a scam. You have to hurry up.

Before you can think about it, before you can contact your consumer advocate, before you can check out the Easy Prey Podcast and find out what’s going on here, you have to hurry up and get your money or $10,000 is going to be gone. It’s $10,000 on the line.

Luckily, one of the victims of this bankruptcy saw all the red warning signs. She sent it to me and she said, “Could this be real?” I said, “It could not be real. It’s not true. There’s no money.” It claimed that there was money that was discovered.

Actually, one of the letters said that the money that was discovered was in cryptocurrency. Now, you know that field. So you’re going to get $10,000 of cryptocurrency. Most of these older people don’t even know what cryptocurrency is, what to do with it if they did get it.

I think that was the letter that was sent. The original letter about the cryptocurrency that was sent to me because later it was like, “I don’t know what I’ll do with the cryptocurrency, how I get it, what will I do with it? Is it real money? Will I get….” I was like, “There’s nothing there. You’re not going to get a cryptocurrency.”

I assume that that scam was they probably were going to give them a certificate that they received $10,000 in crypto. Then when they try to redeem it, they find out that this is just another baloney.

It’s like, “To redeem the crypto we’ve given you, you now need to go to this fake app, provide all these fake credentials, and then we need a fee to convert it from crypto into US currency.”

Yes, “And also there’s going to be a fee attached. You have to pay $1000 of your own cash, and that’ll get you the $10,000 in crypto and then there’s some other fee.” It’s always so convoluted, especially people who are already a victim of something else and they can’t imagine somebody else would be so cruel as to take advantage of them again. But scammers love that, so it happens.

In terms of the real bankruptcy, I know that there are timetables that if you want to join the class, they have to join at a certain time and they have to contact the right people. What’s the framework that people need to be aware of if the company that they have booked with does go through bankruptcy?

They’re supposed to send you a card in the mail that will say you’ve been notified that you’re one of the claimants in this bankruptcy. The problem with that particular company is that in the end, their bookkeeping was not good, as you can imagine. I started getting invoices that were handwritten. It was crazy. I never saw stuff like this before.

You would hope that you would be on the list of claimants, but my experience with this particular bankruptcy is that a great deal of the customers weren’t. If you don’t get any notification, you’re going to have to find out. You’re going to have to do some digging. You’re going to have to go on the Internet. You’re going to have to find a consumer advocate. Or you’re going to have to find a news article that tells you what that particular…because you need to know what court is happening in the bankruptcy.

Usually, you can contact the court. If you can find out what jurisdiction the bankruptcy is being decided in, then you can usually contact the court and ask for some information. There will usually be a warehouse like Stretto where you can sign up and get regular updates.

Before Stretto was set up, I was doing that. They were sending me requests. Well, what’s happening next? You don’t have to worry that the deadline will come and go very quickly. It doesn’t. They filed for bankruptcy on June 29th, and the closing of the claimant list didn’t happen until December. So you have many months.

If you do know that you’re now a victim of a bankrupt company, you just have to keep your eyes open for information. Many times, a bankrupt company isn’t going to provide that information because they don’t have any more employees. And they have no motivation. If their bookkeeping was poor, you’re going to have to be proactive and make sure you’re on that list.

In a lot of cases, it doesn’t matter because if a company owes $110 million and there’s no money left, and $60 million of that is owed to the secured creditors like the banks. In all likelihood, nothing is going to trickle down to the consumers. It’s better to look elsewhere.

Hopefully, pay with a credit card. Hopefully, you have travel insurance to cover an insolvency. If you didn’t, the next thing is to look at the options. Like with this bankruptcy, the new company was very generous. They extended $110 million in future credits for all of the victims of this bankruptcy. There are limitations on how you can spend that, but $110 million of future cruise credits was extended to these victims of the bankruptcy, so at least they’re going to get something.

Also, the credits can be transferred to anybody they want, and they can be used for up to five years. In terms of bankruptcy for consumers, this one, the outcome, what the judge signed with the sale of the customer list, this turned out better than normal for customers because Aurora Expeditions has extended this giant credit. But that’s atypical.

The original company was going to buy this customer list. They were only going to give 20% of the credits, and they could only be used one time. With Aurora, the customers are at least going to get 100%. They could do up to 100% of their credits. They can spend it or give them away, so at least that.

But of course, to the victims of this bankruptcy, it doesn’t look good because they never have been in a bankruptcy before. All they know is they want the refund, which they should, obviously, that would be what we would hope to have happen. But if the company had the money to give the refunds, they wouldn’t be going bankrupt. We wouldn’t be talking about this today. They’d be on their tours and that’d be that.

It’s been a learning curve for a lot of these customers who didn’t understand about travel insurance and travel waivers, what could happen, and how a 40-year-old company could just disintegrate. The insider people knew that this was going off for some time, that there were red flags that the consumers couldn’t see.

I think now that we’re out of the pandemic, consumers can protect themselves from such really consumer catastrophes. This is the only way to describe this, because some of these particular customers were owed $100,000. Some people like that Life at Sea Cruise sold property. They intended to go on an around-the-world cruise and were offloaded in Rome halfway through their trip. Just got a note under the door, “You have to leave the ship today.”

They think they’re spending a year on a cruise and they now have to get off the cruise and find a way home because the company just went bankrupt. So in order to protect yourself against such a catastrophe, it’s important. Even if you know the company very well, even if you have full trust in the company, do some googling.

Go on the Internet, see if there are any reports. Some of the red flags of a company that’s in financial strait, dire strait, when a company starts offering you wacky prices, bargain basement trips, which is what was happening at the end. That’s a giant red flag.

You have to think to yourself, “If $3500 wouldn’t even pay for a business class trip to Europe, but I’m being offered business class air, two weeks in Egypt on a cruise, with all food included: $3500.” OK, you’ve got to take that as a, “As long as I pay cash, I’m going to get this.”

That is probably the biggest red flag that you have to heed it and say, “If all the other tour operators, the same trip cost $15,000 per person, there’s something wrong.” So that was the biggest red flag, I think, that many of these consumers missed in the end, and because they had a long history with the company.

Some of these customers were really emotionally torn up. Not just about the money, but about a beloved tour operator. I have people calling me crying, “Vantage wouldn’t do this to us. We’ve had 27 trips and we know all the tour leaders,” and this and that. Even if that is your experience, things change.

So look up some things on the Internet. Look around and see if anybody’s been complaining that their tours have been canceled and they haven’t received a refund for years since it’s the pandemic. See if there are any news articles. See what the situation is.

To protect yourself, don’t pay with the bank transfer. It’s not worth it to get a $500 discount because you’re giving up the peace of mind that if something happens—this company is insolvent and goes out of business—if you’ve paid with a credit card, the Fair Credit Billing Act will protect you. At least it should, and as long as somebody doesn’t send fake emails and letters and stuff. But Consumer Rescue will be here, and I’m happy to take on those cases.

Always insure your trip. People don’t think. Sometimes, people don’t get any travel insurance at all. They’re thinking, “Well, I’m not going to cancel my trip. I don’t expect to break a leg. I don’t expect to get Covid.” All these things. The fact is, travel insurance is to protect you against unexpected things.

Beyond the fact that you want to get travel insurance that covers you for insolvency, you need to protect yourself because you need travel insurance in case you get sick, in case you get injured while you’re on the trip. People don’t think about that either. Most domestic health insurance doesn’t cover you as you’re cruising around. Medical treatment is very expensive while you’re on a cruise or abroad.

There are multiple reasons why you should get travel insurance, and multiple reasons why you should get travel insurance that is not connected to your tour operator. That’s the main thing.

The last component is to make sure that there’s a clause in that policy that says you are protected against the insolvency of the tour operator, with or without bankruptcy. Some of these travel insurance policies, if you’re not looking closely, will actually have an exclusion that says it’s not included, like if your tour operator goes out of business, if your airline goes out of business, any of this stuff is not covered.

I think what a lot of customers don’t realize is you have 10 days at least, sometimes 14 days, and the date that you purchase a travel insurance policy to read it thoroughly, to make sure that you’re covered for all the things you want to be covered for.

People take the travel insurance policies—12 pages long—they look at this, “I’ve got travel insurance now. Perfect.” But travel insurance policies come in all shapes and forms. You could get minimal coverage, you could get cancel-for-any-reason coverage, very expensive, but you could get that. There are all sorts of things.

You could get a policy that covers you for a preexisting condition. Some people don’t realize that if you have a preexisting condition, and you buy a travel insurance policy, and then you have some illness that’s associated with that preexisting condition, you miss your trip, you’re not covered. It’ll say exactly in their exclusions: pre-existing conditions. There’s a specific insurance for that.

Read the fine print, even if it’s 12 pages long. If you don’t, it could be the difference between getting $30,000 back from a trip that you invested in, to getting nothin—zero—whether there’s a bankruptcy involved or not. You need to read that policy and make sure that you’re being covered.

Some people think that they’re covered for just about anything. That’s not the way travel insurance acts. It’s not what it’s for. It does not protect you against everything. -Michelle Couch-Friedman Share on X

Some people think that they’re covered for just about anything. That’s not the way travel insurance acts. It’s not what it’s for. It does not protect you against everything. The more expensive policies will cover you for more, but you want to make sure that you’re covered. Some people think, “My dog died. That should cover me.” It doesn’t.

In terms of bankruptcy, you want to make sure that says you’re covered for insolvency of the tour operator, and insolvency that covers whether or not the company actually files bankruptcy. Sometimes, companies will go insolvent for quite a while and try to reorganize. That’s still insolvency. But if your policy just says you’re covered for bankruptcy, you’re not covered.

That can be very frustrating because lots of companies that go into Chapter 11, they reorganize, they come back, and maybe you just have a future credit with the company. Or sometimes, the reorganization in a Chapter 11 removes the debts, so you don’t have that money even for a future credit.

Now, most companies that are emerging at Chapter 11 probably will offer you future credit based on whatever you wrote, but I’ve seen it happen whether or not. The best thing to do is research the company that you’re investing in for your trip, then pay with a credit card, and then also get yourself travel insurance that covers with or without bankruptcy insolvency.

The best thing to do is research the company that you’re investing in for your trip, then pay with a credit card, and then also get yourself travel insurance that covers with or without bankruptcy insolvency. -Michelle… Share on X

Awesome. If people want to learn more about the services that your organization provides, where can they go?

Go to consumerrescue.org, and we have an About Us page. You can see my whole team there. As I said, if you have a problem, you want to do it yourself, we have Meera who can give you the company contacts for almost any company in the world. It’s very good finding hard-to-find contacts. Then we have a giant database of people that we know over the years have been very helpful to customers.

You can see that we have a button there to Ask Meera for help. We have a button there where you can ask me and my colleague, Dwayne Coward, for real help if you need to bring out the big guns, you have a problem, you’ve all been trying to solve it on your own, and that’s not been helping.

You can ask us for assistance and we will take your case. Sometimes, we do get cases where the reason that it’s not been resolved is because there’s no way to resolve it. The customer is not always right. I hate to say it, but it’s not always right.

But if you do feel that you are right, you’ve done all the things and try to resolve the problem on your own, then there’s a button on the consumerrescue.org site. It says get help. That will send your complaint to me or Dwayne—we share the same email box—we’ll review all the details, and we will take your battle on. And free. It’s always free.

That’s great to hear. Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you, Chris.

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