The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced yesterday that the final repatriation charter flights for holidaymakers affected by the failure of the XL Leisure Group have arrived back in the UK, and said that the focus is now on working to deal with refund claims from people with pre-booked ATOL-protected XL holidays.

A small number of ATOL-protected XL tour operator customers are still abroad on extended trips. The CAA will continue to work with UK tour operators abroad and the Foreign Office to ensure that information is available about what people still abroad should do about flights home and, where appropriate, obtaining a refund from the CAA. There will be no further chartered repatriation flights operating, so any customers who booked direct with XL Airways and are not ATOL protected will now have to make their own arrangements to return to the UK.

During the 17 days since XL’s collapse on 12 September, the CAA has arranged 222 flights from 40 destinations, returning an estimated 83,000 holidaymakers, both ATOL-protected XLLG passengers and the customers of other ATOL-protected tour operators that shared XL flights, and XL Airways passengers who will have to pay a reasonable fee for their carriage. As well as organising flights, the CAA and travel industry arranged transport by ferries, coaches, trains and taxis to bring people home, as well as additional accommodation.

Richard Jackson, CAA Director of Consumer Protection, said: “The task of repatriating XL customers at the end of their holidays is now by and large completed. We are pleased that overall these arrangements have worked well and once again I want to extend my thanks to our colleagues in the travel industry and the overseas representatives of Thomson/First Choice, Thomas Cook and Virgin Holidays, whose hard work ensured the smoothest possible operation.

“We recognise the need to learn from our experiences and we will be reviewing our response so far to the XL failure to ensure that any relevant lessons are learned to ensure that the CAA continues to offer customers affected by failures such as this one the best level of service. We now ask claimants to bear with us and understand we are working as swiftly as possible to process refund claims.”

The preliminary work necessary to process the refunds from over 200,000 customers who have pre-booked holidays with XL has already started, but with an estimated 70,000 claims expected to be received the refund process will take longer than for smaller failures. People who have already made a claim will be contacted shortly with a claim reference. Those yet to claim should contact their travel agent about whether they can book alternative holiday arrangements and assign their claim. Otherwise, they can download a claim form from the ATOL website: www.atol.org.uk.