BOSTON – A bill that seeks to secure full refunds to families for school trips canceled during a state of emergency met pushback Wednesday from representatives of tour companies, who argued it does not reflect the realities of their business.
One of state government’s first actions in response to the coronavirus outbreak, in early March, was to urge colleges and high schools to cancel their scheduled international trips, as the spring break season loomed. Later in the month, some countries around the globe would close their borders and the U.S. State Department would advise Americans not to travel internationally.
Rep. Josh Cutler’s bill (H 4696), which has 32 cosponsors, would deem it an unfair or deceptive practice for “any travel company, travel agency, tour business, or travel agent acting on behalf of a consumer” to fail to provide a full monetary refund, upon request, for a school-related trip or tour that’s canceled as a result of a declaration of emergency.
The only speakers to testify on the bill during a virtual hearing the Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee held Wednesday had ties to travel companies and opposed the legislation.
Jeff Ment, a Connecticut lawyer who told the committee he specializes in representing travel companies, said the bill was “really casting aspersions upon a company that may have no control over a refund.”
Travel companies and tour operators, he said, function primarily as middlemen, and would in most cases no longer have in their hands the money that families would be seeking to have refunded. Ment said the companies would have already sent the funds to vendors for things like buses, hotels, meals and tickets to attractions, which require payments in advance for group travel.
Liz Rees of ACIS Educational Tours said a year or more of work goes into assembling educational tours, and those planning and staffing costs and money paid to suppliers are either nonrefundable or only refunded to the companies in part, and not always in cash.
She said the bill would have a “catastrophic impact” on an industry that is already facing a “completely lost” travel season and, like other fields, has endured layoffs and salary cuts due to fallout from the pandemic.
“We understand that the current events have introduced economic challenges for Massachusetts families,” Rees said. “However, the same has been true for educational travel companies like ACIS.”
Ment said one client of his, in Boston, had paid suppliers for a Europe trip that didn’t happen, and some European governments have said those suppliers do not have to issue refunds. He said it would be difficult for travel companies to stay in business if they have to refund money that isn’t being returned to them.
“They certainly should be able to make partial refunds of the money they have,” Ment said. “This is not an instance where the travel companies are looking to profit off the backs of the students of Massachusetts, but rather it has to be drafted more artfully, if at all, because the travel companies are stuck in the middle.”
The bill addresses what Sen. Paul Feeney, the co-chair of the Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee, said has been the topic of many phone calls legislators have received from families.
“One of the things that I certainly can’t live with is, if I have a family that the mother or the father lost their jobs or perhaps have been furloughed, escalating expenses trying to take care of their family through this pandemic, where they’re the ones at the end of the chain who don’t get anything out of this,” he said.
Feeney, a Foxborough Democrat, said it’s not necessarily the tour companies, but “somebody, somewhere is taking a profit where they maybe shouldn’t be,” and asked the groups who testified to work with lawmakers to figure out “who we should be going after.”
“We’re all trying to figure out where this kind of goes, where it rolls downhill, totally understanding that small businesses in every sector are feeling the pinch because of this pandemic,” he said.
Last week, Attorney General Maura Healey announced an assurance of discontinuance with the Cambridge-based educational travel company EF, through which the company would offer more than $1.4 million in additional refunds to nearly 4,200 Massachusetts consumers whose canceled trips were scheduled to depart between March 11 and May 14. The refunds range from $100 for domestic travel by bus to $435 for international travel.
Healey’s office said it reached out to EF after receiving more than 600 complaints from consumers “dissatisfied with the company’s response.”
“Families shouldn’t have to worry about getting their money back for cancelled trips during a pandemic,” Healey said in a statement.
William Dunn, EF’s general counsel, told the committee that his company had an “open and candid” dialogue with Healey’s staff and that he believes such a process represents a better route than new legislation.
“What we hope is that this was a one-time event in terms of when it hit in the travel season and what we had to do quickly in response,” he said.
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Flow of money complicates student travel refunds - Lowell Sun
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