The boss of Freedom Travel in Douglas says he is happy to be back open and selling holidays after a nightmare few weeks since the collapse of travel giant Thomas Cook, writes Sam Turton.

Jan Wozniak has told the Examiner he ’fully sympathises’ with people whose holiday plans have been wrecked and said it broke his heart to have to cancel direct flights to Spain and Lapland.

The collapse of Thomas Cook on Monday, September 23, rocked the world of travel and that was felt just as hard in the Isle of Man.

Staff at the failed giant were told they would receive no redundancy and ordered to stay away from their store and holidays were cancelled.

For Mr Wozniak and Freedom Travel, the impact was far greater than expected.

While part of the Freedom Travel Group, owned by Thomas Cook, Mr Wozniak’s business was also part of Cooperative Travel and therefore should have been safe from the aftershock of Thomas Cook’s collapse.

Mr Wozniak and his staff found themselves locked out of their computer systems and with him away at a running event in France, he was relying on speaking to other store owners online and keeping his store in Strand Street closed.

Mr Wozniak said: ’We had no communication whatsoever [from administrators KPMG] and understood that perhaps in 48 hours we’d be able to open.

’The notice we put in the window, was all the information we had, there was nothing about us being evasive.

’The next thing we got was a notice from the Civil Aviation Authority saying we’d be getting procedures of claims for our clients.

’So everything we’ve done, we had to do ourselves and I have to take my hat off to my staff who have done a fabulous job to work flat out to process those claims.

’But bear in mind, processing the claims is one thing if you have a system and computers, they had to do it with hard files and it was pen and paper.’

It would be 10 days before Freedom Travel had access to its computer servers when it was finally released by the administrators. Aside from their own customers ringing them, Freedom Travel staff were also dealing with calls from residents who had booked both in store and online with Thomas Cook and were seeking answers.

Mr Wozniak decided to operate a four- hours-a-day clinic to ease some of the pressure of the phone calls they were receiving, however despite events being outside their control, he said he was disappointed that some of the staff felt threatened while trying to help people.

He added: ’I can understand that booking a holiday is a big expense.

’I feel sorry for that and I’ve always said sorry.

’If you’ve got passion for the travel industry, a big plus is seeing the smile on someone’s face when they’ve booked their holiday or they’re on their way or when they’ve come back and we were seeing the complete opposite.’

This extended to the people who were booked on direct flights from the island which Mr Wozniak organised and sold through his store.

He said the decision to suspend flights for the rest of the year was a difficult one, but the right one considering the issues faced by Thomas Cook customers around the world.

Mr Wozniak said: ’It broke my heart because I personally go down to the airport every Saturday I can to speak to people, I see them off, I speak to our reps in resort to make sure that everything has gone through smoothly.

’We take personal care and I enjoy that, the passion of seeing a happy person is special and we knew that when the crisis came, there was no way we could send the flights out so we sent the flight out empty to bring our customers home.

’We thought we could make progress with KPMG to get funds released for future direct flights, especially with half term and children being booked on them flights, but we couldn’t get the payment released.’

Unfortunately, this also led to the Lapland flights to meet Santa Claus in December being cancelled for this year.

Mr Wozniak added that while Freedom Travel is once again open and selling holidays, the direct flights were not yet confirmed.

Now Mr Wozniak’s store has officially joined the Cooperative Mid Counties group based in Warwick, a move he said was about ’going back to our values’.

He said: ’We were approached by Midcounties Cooperative, which is the largest in the UK and was interested in working with us.

’This means we now go under the Cooperative banner, the biggest change is that the company is owned by a trust, it is owned by the people, meaning they have family values, which is what we understand.

’It is paramount that the cover is there, we had that cover there which is why our clients will be able to get their claims through.

’Also with the Cooperative, we have the ABTA and the ATOL, so it gives extra security when booking with Freedom Travel Isle of Man.’