Why is the Travel Industry such a special case

Travel is the only major industry where Client pre-payments are not legally required to be safeguarded in Trust. Bookies, Undertakers and Estate Agents are obliged to protect Client money, but not travel companies.
This despite Travel accounting for some devastating and hurtful company failures: Thomas Cook, Monarch, XL. Upsetting failures for those who lost holidays and extremely costly for tax-payers and consumers.
The 2024 DMCC Bill added blanket safeguards for (almost) all pre-payments. Unfathomably, Travel was excluded.

Can anyone tell us why?

Despite constantly drawing attention to this scandalous failure with successive governments and the CAA, we are none the wiser.

Trailfinders is living proof of concept that an ethical and principled approach to safeguarding Client’s money brings both success and profit yet the unprincipled embezzlement of Client money is unfathomably still condoned in Travel. Why?


Embezzlement (Investopedia definition)
Embezzlement refers to a form of white-collar crime in which a person or entity intentionally misappropriates the assets entrusted to them. In this type of fraud, the embezzler attains the assets lawfully and has the right to possess them, but the assets are then used for unintended purposes.