If you were unfortunate to book with Skoosh, I just received an email that they are liquidating their business. I was told to contact my credit card to start the refund process. Has anyone had to deal with a company that was being liquidated? I canceled my trip 2 weeks ago for A May trip. The credit card people told me that usually a company waits a couple days before your travel date to let you know the bad news.
We booked a trip for next Halloween with couples travel way back in November with $200 deposit. They sent an email out in early January communicating that they were doing away with their business in carribean and actually recommended we recover deposit by disputing charges with our cc company. I did so by attaching their email to dispute. CC company recovered in full. We used Skoosh 2 or 3 times in past no problems. Suspect we may see quite a few more of these companies give up.
Hey guys!! So we are currently going through the same thing with Bookit.com. We were supposed to travel from March 24-29. We called and cancelled everything in early March and received notifications that we would be receiving a flight credit and refund for the stay. A couple days after we cancelled, Bookit went bankrupt and actually stranded a bunch of people that had already traveled. We waited a couple weeks and a refund never came. Luckily we came across a travel thread that said we should dispute the charges and we did so immediately. We upgraded to a CapitalOne Venture card last year just for travel and had paid for the trip with it. They have been awesome and deducted the charges. I will say that the dispute is still pending at the moment.
Sorry to hear that, hope you get your money back. It might be more difficult with a company going bankrupt than one that is liquid. I've heard of some people who booked with bookit losing their money altogether even after a chargeback. Anyone else surprised how many travel companies are going bust? And airlines claiming they are in trouble? It's been almost a month with next to no travel, and advance bookings having to be cancelled. But very few seem to be refunding clients in any case, instead offering credits with an expiry date that they hope you don't get to use. They still have the money. Are these big companies really so delicate that a month of no business puts them under? They must be using money from advanced bookings to pay for current ones, almost like a Ponzi. I'm a one man band, and have refunded $30K+ of bookings. It didn't hurt (well not immediately) because that money always sits untouched until the service has been delivered, just in case it needs to be refunded.
Steve, I think you are exactly correct, and those businesses (primarily the airlines) are set up that way, using the inbound income stream, which is for "future travel" to pay for their "current costs." So, when a customer books and pays, whatever they pay, that ends up in an operating account from which are drawn out their costs (i.e. payroll, equip, rentals, insurance and so forth). I bet we've got at least one, probably more, higher-level manager of a business which operates in just this way who can explain "why" this is done this way.
