Like vendors in a bazaar, tour operators who sell spring-break trips have spread out their wares. College bulletin boards are hung with gaudy fliers showing young people cavorting on beaches in Florida, Texas, Cancun, the Bahamas, Jamaica.
Also like vendors in a bazaar, some operators do not deliver what they promise. An un-air-conditioned room sleeping 80 on the top floor of a hotel is not what students have in mind when they see a flier, but one student complained to the government last year about being assigned to such quarters.
Thousands of students get where they are going every year and have a wonderful week. Often, too, the price is right, with a week in Cancun costing as little as $399. However, when things go wrong, unhappy students often cannot learn who is the responsible party.
A fellow student who distributed the flier may be earning a free trip from a travel agent. The travel agent may be selling a tour put together by a wholesaler, which might consist of seats bought on a flight provided by a charter airline, plus hotel arrangements made through a land operator in a foreign country. The student has difficulty finding out who is responsible for a last-minute cancellation, a departure shifted to a city seven hours away by car, or room arrangements that put the student in a hotel or condominium with strangers from another school instead of the friends with whom the plans were made.
These situations have all taken place in recent years, according to reports made to state attorneys general and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Except when outright fraud is involved, the only part of these packages protected by any law stronger than caveat emptor is charter air travel. Most air travel is now deregulated, but the Transportation Department has rules governing “public charters,” meaning charters on which anyone-as opposed to a club member-may buy a seat. Almost all spring-break operators use charters.
Spring-break brochures are the “most critical documents” in the process of selling a trip, according to Hoyte B. Decker Jr. of the Consumer Protection Department at the Transportation Department. Students may never see anything else other than the “operator-participant contract” required for charters, which specifies prices and terms for refunds and which must be signed by the traveler.
Decker said the rules for public charters require that a brochure identify “prominently” the company actually responsible for the tour. One way is for the brochure to list a Transportation Department filing number, although this is not required. The number, usually preceded by “PC” for “public charter,” enables a student to find out whether the operator has taken steps to operate a charter flight or is advertising something that does not yet exist.
A student does this by calling the Transportation Department’s charter office at 202-366-2395 or 202-366-2396 to ask if the number covers a flight from a particular city to the destination on the date in question.
A number may cover a series of trips between the same cities occurring within a year, so sometimes 1995 charters bear numbers beginning with “94.” In the absence of a number, the student can ask the Transportation Department if the company identified on the flier has filed for a charter on the date in question. While at least one charter company, not a spring-break operator, has been fined for failing to meet the rules, the department prefers to negotiate compliance.
Companies that file a prospectus get a number from the department and are then subject to a 10-day review, during which they may not advertise the trip. If they demonstrate they are financially stable and have an airline agreement and a bank for escrow deposits, they are allowed to advertise trips. If changes must be made, the 10-day freeze begins again.
A crucial part of the rules specifies that the tour operator may not cancel the trip within 10 days of departure unless it is “physically impossible” to make the trip.
If the trip is to be on a charter and the identified company has not filed with the department, the student should probably look elsewhere. “Very few” charters operate illegally, Decker says, but “creative operators are always testing the limits of the rules.”
To learn about the spring-break business, I gathered fliers from college bulletin boards in New York and Connecticut for seven companies that sell these trips. People in the industry estimate that there are some 15 companies in this field in the Northeast; this does not count established concerns such as Council Travel or STA. Those agencies sell spring-break trips, often from campus offices, as part of a year-round operation.
In response to a request, the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York checked with bureaus in other parts of the country to find out whether complaints had been lodged against any of the seven companies operating there. There were reports of complaints about Student Holidays in Atlanta, and the bureau in Massachusetts cited problems last year at Take a Break. No other negative reports were relayed. This does not indicate there were no complaints, only that any complaints have been resolved.
Here is a sampling of spring-break tours.
Take a Break (76 Summer St., Boston, Mass. 02110; 617-292-0200) had 120 written and 100 phone complaints-covering 1,000 students nationwide-filed against it with the Massachusetts attorney general last year. Leslie Davies, an assistant attorney general, said the complaints concerned availability, location, quality, cancellations, refunds, delays and last-minute changes.
Arlie Scott, director of the consumer complaint and information section of the attorney general’s office, said that parents could not find their children at the places where they were supposed to be and were frantic; some students slept on the beach or were stranded at airports. She said the attorney general’s office had obtained $14,000 to $15,000 in refunds on behalf of Take a Break clients during several months of handling the complaints. All of last year’s complaints were resolved.
Funquest Vacations has filed charter plans with the Transportation Department for trips this year to Cancun; Negril and Montego Bay, Jamaica; Barbados; and South Padre Island, Tex. The phone number on the Funquest flier, 800-795-4786, reaches an office at 441 W. 6th Ave., Conshohocken, Pa. 19428, and the phone is sometimes answered “College Tours.” College Tours is a travel agency owned by a travel company called Cerkvenik-Anderson of Phoenix, which also owns Funquest, the tour operator, housed at the same address in Conshohocken.
Last year, according to Louis Monaco, a salesman for College Tours, his company sold 5,700 spring-break trips to students.
There are ways for students to try to protect themselves. All legitimate charters must have a public charter number. If an advertisement does not list one, call the phone number on the ad and ask for the number that applies to the trip. If the answer is that the company is not the tour operator and does not have a charter number, ask for the name and location of the responsible operator.
If the answers are uninformed or misleading, students can call the Transportation Department phone line, as noted above, and check on the filing that way.
