Hi,

Welcome to the board, as airflights are a retail agent for atol holders then i cannot understand why they would not involve themselves with helping you with a failure of a company that they have booked you with.

Can you explain further as to what they won't help you with as some of us on here might be able to point you in the right direction.

We had a couple of clients affected by the custom flights failure and everyone was accommodated within a day or so i believe and any that we couldn't sort then they can claim from ATOL so i find it scary that as your booking agent isn't being much use.

Let us know and i'm sure we will all help in some way.

Ref Airflights.
September 2008 I booked return flights to Dalaman from Manchester. I booked early to get the flight times I wanted & paid premium price.
My 1st knowledge of Custom flights was in august 2009 when they e-mailled to say my flights home would be moved from 17.00 to 19.00 - still not inconvenient.
Had holiday & 2 days before return home rang to confirm flight (Oct 10,2009) to be told flight did not exist. Big panic for 4 hours till they rang back to say flight home would be to Birmingham, leaving at 06.30 - this meant getting up at 2.30am which was whole point of booking so early! Worse - I'd already pre- paid for taxi xfer to airport (£75) & could not contact taxi firm to change times. So I had to pay a local taxi £75 to get us to airport for 4.30am.
Airflights refused to return £75 or compensate for 1 day lost holiday & so far have had no reply other than an acknowledgement of my complaint from ABTA.
Not as serious as those who were stranded, but since I booked with Airflights, I expected a little more than a curt
"not our problem".

To be honest with you, this was very typical of custom flights this year for some reason which is why we didn't really use them that much.

From what you said has happened, i would put it down to bad experience, airflights are merely an agent and whilst i appreciate your frustration, like anyone being put in that situation, airflights do not control what custom flights do.

As custom flights are no longer here then there is very little you can do i'm afraid, i wouldn't expect airflights to pay out either as what has happened is outside their control and if it were my clients, i would have done the same.
Without sounding harsh, if i was to pay out for every operators mistake, errors, changes or whatever, then all of us would be out of a job. I understand what your saying and from a customer service point of view, maybe they could of met you half way but like any reasonable sized company you are just a number to them and it is on to the next booking.

Sorry i can't be much help but i think if you were to ask any major travel agent then they would say the same and in a way, i'm glad we stopped using custom flights as they were a complete nightmare.