FAMILY SAFE HOLIDAYS: Reassurance for Families on Holiday

ABTA is launching a brand new service for families today - 9 July - to help them be safer on holidays abroad.

Family Safe Holidays provides a secure, online account, which will store vital information in case of emergencies on holiday, and the service, which is available to all of ABTA’s 1500 Members from today, can then be offered to customers, free of charge, throughout 2007.

Community Alerts has been developing its Family Safe Holidays service with ABTA over the last two years, and now the service is ready for families to use for this summer’s school holidays.

The online safety ‘deposit box’ can store all kinds of details including information about your family with photos, medical conditions, medication and allergies, travel itineraries, passport details, insurance policy details and emergency numbers for credit cards. There are also blank fields for customers to input other important details of their choosing and even a feature allowing customers to email the whole itinerary to their next of kin.

Families can also utilise the service to immediately produce a missing poster of a lost child or adult, which can be viewed in six different languages and made available on the internet or via email.

All of this information can be made available very quickly via a unique family id and password.

Separately, the website contains other generic information on what you need to know before travel. It provides contact numbers for card issuers, mobile phone operators, travel insurance companies, car hire companies, airlines, and 24 hour numbers for Consulates and Embassies, which can be printed off in the event of the most common problems that occur abroad, such as having to make an insurance claim, lost and stolen wallets and passports.

"I am delighted that we can endorse this service," said Keith Richards, ABTA Head of Business Development and Consumer Affairs, "it provides practical solutions to the most common problems families face on holiday, but importantly, it also offers critical, and timely help when the most serious of all incidents happen. It's a service that uses online security that banks use, so customers can be confident that the information they register is safe."

Paul Kent, founder of Community Alerts said: "Family holidays should be happy, enjoyable times and provide lasting memories for the right reasons. We are therefore very pleased that ABTA has taken the lead in helping Community Alerts to develop this service, which will help keep families safe while abroad on holiday."

6 July 2007

Notes to Editors
ABTA Members can sign up to this free web-based service now for their customers’ use. To find out more go to www.familysafeholidays.co.uk or contact Family Safe holidays (info@familysafeholidays.co.uk) on 08700 624 919, or you can contact Michael Threlfall (mthrelfall@abta.co.uk) at ABTA on 020 7307 1901.

If you wish to find out more information or would like to support this initiative, please email: info@familysafeholidays.co.uk or call 08700 62 49 19.