Travelsafe for Safer Holiday Accommodation

We all take out travel insurance to cover unexpected events which might affect our plans or to cover our personal property. However, we cannot always be sure of the safety of the accommodation we are booked into abroad. Who can forget the tragic news reports about the deaths of the two children from carbon monoxide poisoning in Corfu last summer. That awful event highlighted the need for safety checks of accommodations to protect holidaymakers abroad.

We saw a report that some of the top accommodation booking companies, including OnHoliday Group/Jet2holidays and Lowcostbeds are signing up to a new scheme aimed to monitor the safety of holiday accommodation. The Travelsafe health and safety accreditation system will blacklist any hotels, villas or apartments if they don’t pass the new safety standard tests. Under the new system, it will mean the properties they list as safe have been checked via a self-audit or full audit in various health and safety areas such as fire, swimming pool, food hygiene and child safety. Hotels will be rated accordingly and the information made available to travel agents and tour operators. Hoteliers can do a self-assessment, or a full audit may be carried out with resulting ratings of Gold, Silver, Bronze or Non-Compliant.

Any hotels that are found to be unsafe for any reason will be given the chance to make changes and if they still fail to do so they will be blacklisted from Travelsafe member sites. The system cannot guarantee there will never be any problems at all, but the standard it sets should help to avoid any more tragedies like Corfu.

It could also mean changes for those who own and rent out their overseas properties. If the rental is managed through a major UK tour operator or advertised on a holiday letting website and they are members of Travelsafe then the property will have to undergo the health and safety checks prior to being offered for letting. This seems like a good start. Website: www.travelsafe.biz.

Go to main >>