Luxury Link declares bankruptcy. Trips Canceled (thread re-opened)
 

Had a trip planned to Costa Rica in a couple months. Got this in my email box:



So annoying. Hopefully AMEX can get me a refund. Going through bankruptcy proceeding is going to suck.

More info on expedia...

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic...Peninsula.html

Me, too
 

I received the same email and have tried to contact LL by phone but VM is full. I have emailed the hotels that I booked to see if I am still confirmed. Have you tried that? If we already paid for it, why wouldn't the reservation still be valid?

lesson - reserve, then communicate directly with hotel
(i had problem with SLH not sending everything to hotel)

From what I gathered from the expedia forums, it sounds like Luxury Link pays the hotel a month before the reservation. One couple that went to a Luxury Link hotel this past week were told that there reservation was there, but they hadn't received payment yet. They had to pay again.

I've initiated a chargeback with Amex. Sent emails to the hotel to see if my reservation is still there and whether they'd honor the luxury link price. So annoying.

Wow! And to think I was just posting a few weeks ago about what a wonderful experience we had using Luxury Link.

Wow, interesting news. The website is still working but when you try to book it's unable to process.

I booked a package with them last month for 4 nights in a lux hotel in Pienza Italy in July. Pre-paid and "non refundable".
Today I got an email saying the reservation had been cancelled and my (AMEX) card had been refunded. But no explanation, nothing like the OP's email. They aren't answering the phone or replying to emails.
I didn't figure it out until I went to their Facebook page which is filled with irate posts by people who have been stranded and NOT had their money refunded.
I am hoping the hotel will still honor my reservation and rate.
This is a huge disappointment. I've booked deals with LL for over 10 years and always been very happy with them.

Quite sad. It's been a while but I've done one LL trip in the past and it was fine. I suppose it was killed by the onset of hotel consolidators and multi-site search engines.

I was under the impression it was based on three things:

1. LL over-promising amenities* and a lower cost.

2. LL eating the difference - hoping bulk would cover it. It never caught on to the point it was cost effective

3. LL didn't have the best relationship with these hotels

*I once asked the DoS at Charleston Place how LL was offering what it was - $150 spa credit, etc, at an under BAR level. The quizzical look on her face was borderline hilarious, and her commentary was even better: "we're still trying to figure that out."

Presuming that you paid with a CC issued by a US-based issuer, you have 100% protection in bankruptcy. If you paid with other than a CC, you are likely SOL and stand as an unsecured creditor, which means that you likely, although not certainly, will see next to nothing until sometime down the road.

The CC networks track bankruptcies and will have flagged these transactions already. Your chargeback should be sustained relatively immediately.

That leaves you with needing to rebook the deal. Question is whether the property will honor the deal if you do it directly or whether there are other organizers who will step in as a way to build a customer base.

Unfortunately this link no longer works. It seems that Trip Advisor not only closed it, but also removed the thread. It's a shame because people were sharing their strategies and successes on what to do, now that they have vacations planned in the near term future. In most cases, the resorts were telling people they needed to pay upon arrival. Although payments we're made to Luxury Link in many cases via credit card months ago, the resorts were not paid by LL.

The best case scenario was to request a refund from your credit card company and furnishing the credit card company a copy of the email received yesterday from the firm handling the LL liquidation……………..along with contacting the resort directly and asking them if they would honor the LL price. In this thread that has now been removed, there were people who had success with this approach.

I've used Luxury Link many times over several years, all over the world, in hotels, villas for large groups, in Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, Canada, Italy, the US, and I've always had good experiences. It started to go downhill a couple of years ago after new investors came in and installed a new management team. It's sad to see this happen.

It's my understanding that the employees are gone, no one to answer their phones. Yesterday I read a post on twitter that this firm was handling the liquidation:
http://corpmgt.com/about.html

This is only the start of a trend
 

Sorry for those FTalkers concerned.

My theory (which is sometimes contested here on FT, especially by Virtuoso agents). Intermediaries will increasingly become unnecessary due to :
- better direct marketing of properties offering online deals,
- more traveled and educated public and
- more people shopping online and directly with the properties.

This said, many agents may disappear in the future. Perhaps a very small number for the super rich people's travel arrangements will remain.

The latest small stupid example: Swiss Federal Railways will stop all their travel agent activity.

The trend - statistically speaking - is actually the opposite. Many (I dare say 'most') vendors are going back to preferring travel agent bookings because OTAs cost is much higher than it would be just to pay commission to an agent..

My theory (which is sometimes contested here on FT, especially by Virtuoso agents). Intermediaries will increasingly become unnecessary due to :
- better direct marketing of properties offering online deals,
- more traveled and educated public and
- more people shopping online and directly with the properties.


That's quite a statement--that third party sales channels will decrease into oblivion. Not sure what your business experience is, but employing sales channels that are commission based, especially in environments of increasing compliance and regulation, is probably going to increase if anything.

These types of trends: outsource, insource, outsource again are usually driven by risk management more so than whether a few of us consumers can click buttons.

And, after all, expedia is a travel agent. You think that they'll disappear because people will book directly through United?