An online flight booking company with links to collapsed budget airfare company Bestjet has left travellers thousands of dollars out of pocket after it entered voluntary administration just days after customers say they handed over money to the firm.
sydney-based Fly365 appointed a voluntary administrator on Friday, wiping both its website and Facebook page and leaving customers who believed they had secured flight bookings through the company with little information about how to recoup their money.
The company is just one of a number of online flight-booking agencies to collapse in recent months, and its demise raises questions about the adequacy of self-regulation in the industry.
Among the hundreds of Fly365 customers to have potentially lost money from the company’s collapse are James Price and Steven Somers, who spent $11,000 booking flights to Europe for themselves and family members on Friday, 14 February.
The couple booked the trip after Somers was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in January. “We decided that with a host of potential travel issues in the future we’d go while we still could, we wanted to travel with our family to Europe,” Price said.
The money was withdrawn from their account five days later, but…
