O.C. Travel Agency Closes; Customers Left in the Cold

A Laguna Hills travel agency that specializes in trips to Australia and New Zealand apparently has closed, leaving customers out thousands of dollars they paid for airline tickets they never received.

Anxious clients of Australia New Zealand Travel Service Inc. who are awaiting plane tickets for holiday travel have called the firm only to hear a recorded message telling them the agency closed its doors Thursday. The message then instructs them to contact the airlines directly about ticketing.

Sharon Euper of Sierra Madre said she did just that, only to find that United Airlines never received the $1,100 she paid to the travel agency in November to buy a round-trip flight to Auckland, New Zealand.

Ditto for nearly 100 passengers who flooded the phone lines of Air New Zealand, a major carrier down under.

“It’s really an unfortunate situation,” said Air New Zealand spokesman James Boyd. “We’re victims too. This is our busy season, we’ve reserved these seats and we haven’t been paid.”

Complaints are already pouring in to the region’s Better Business Bureau, and some passengers like Euper have contacted local law enforcement agencies. But for now, passengers face the unpleasant dilemma of either canceling their holiday trips or draining their bank accounts to pay for new tickets.

Bruce Clayton, a professor from Meadville, Pa., said a friend wired him $3,000 so he and his wife could buy new tickets to attend a conference in New Zealand just after Christmas.

“This has put me in a real bind,” Clayton said. “My first inclination was to go out and beat someone up. But what can I do?” Clayton says he saw an ad for the Laguna Hills agency’s services in an East Coast publication and had booked a trip through them two years ago without incident.

In addition to scrambling to save their holiday vacations, consumers who bought tickets from Australia New Zealand Travel face a harsh reality.

According to state officials, the Laguna Hills agency never registered under California’s Seller of Travel Law, which set up a agency-financed restitution fund to reimburse residents who are victims of travel fraud or who lose money when an operator goes belly up.

Thus, those travelers are not eligible to apply to the fund to get their money back in the event the agency’s owner, identified by the Better Business Bureau as Peter R. Adam, does not reimburse them for the missing tickets.

Adam could not be reached for comment.

California law requires most travel agencies to hold passenger funds in trust until the airlines, cruise ships and other suppliers are paid.

But it has not prevented some shady operators and financially strapped agencies from getting their hands on the money before consumers get what they paid for. The 1989 collapse of an Encino travel agent left hundreds of travelers stranded around the world.

New Zealand Air’s Boyd said the carrier is offering discounted fares to help passengers who booked through Australia New Zealand Travel Service complete their vacation plans.