Agency Shuts; Travelers Out Tickets, Cash

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 purchase 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.

Complaints are already pouring into the region’s Better Business Bureau, and some passengers such as 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 cabled him the $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?”

In addition to scrambling to save their holiday vacations, consumers who purchased tickets from Australia New Zealand Travel Service Inc. face another unhappy reality.

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

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

Adam could not be reached for comment.