Stuttgart (dpa/tmn) –
Booking is just a few clicks away: Internet portals make holiday planning easy. But who will carry out the journey at the end? You are usually better off with a single all-round provider.
Flight, hotel, transfer: If you book a package tour from an online travel portal, you should take a look at the statement to protect yourself. If the entire sum is to be transferred to a provider, everything is fine.
However, if you find out that the booking is spread over several invoices, it is probably not a package tour. If something goes wrong during the trip, that can be a problem. The Baden-Württemberg consumer advice center points this out.
The problem with the individual building blocks
According to the consumer advocates, it is a “frequent annoyance” when booking via online travel portals: A holiday that is supposedly booked as a whole turns out to be a puzzle of travel modules from different providers.
The problem behind this: If a flight is canceled, for example, the hotel booking can often not be easily adjusted – so you end up paying money even though you are not using the service. In addition, vacationers have the stress: In this example, they would have to take care of how to get to their travel destination themselves and deal with the airline, for example. After all, the contractual partner is responsible for the flight. For the night it is the hotel.
In such a case, the portals are only intermediaries and usually only refer to the respective providers, the consumer advocates describe. If they report back at all.
Better protection for package tours
Package travelers are better off with such problems. The organizer must be responsible for the entire travel package. For example, if the flight is cancelled, he has to arrange for alternative transportation. Holidaymakers are also better protected in other respects – for example, the money paid for the holiday is also protected in the event that the organizer goes bankrupt.
