CAPE Town-based travel agency, Destiny Holidays, has allegedly defrauded 31 clients, tallying up to R1,6m over the past few months. A WhatsApp group has been set up to track the extent of the alleged misappropriated funds. Group members say over 20 cases of fraud have been opened so far and that the Hawks Commercial Investigating Unit is in the process of combining these and transferring the cases to Cape Town where the crimes allegedly took place. Sunette Swenson told TNW that her parents had booked a R160 000 NCL cruise to Norway with Destiny Holidays. She says her father was up to date on payments but on May 24, the day before the final payment was due to be paid to the agency, a Destiny Holidays consultant told him that she believed the directors were not paying clients’ money to travel suppliers. Her father contacted the tour operator who confirmed that Destiny Holidays had short paid them for his booking and had also refused to give them the client’s direct contact details when the tour operator explained to her father that the cruise booking would be automatically cancelled if the balance of monies owing was not received within the next 24 hours. Sunette says her family repeatedly tried to contact the owner/managers of Destiny Holidays to no avail. Sunette got hold of a director who promised to arrange payment that day. Later, she received an SMS from him saying that all further correspondence
relating to Destiny Holidays was to be channelled through O’Reilly Law. The lawyers later said that Destiny Holidays was in the process of filing for liquidation. The agency’s legal counsel has since changed and Sunette says the current lawyers say they have not yet received instructions from their clients regarding how to proceed.
While Sunette’s parents have not yet opened a case of fraud, she says they have paid the operator the outstanding balance to save the booking, but she alleges that Destiny Holidays has run off with R95 000, and says there could have been a further R37 000 lost if the Destiny Holidays consultant had not alerted them to the situation. Another alleged victim, Paul Peens, paid Destiny Holidays for his honeymoon to Maldives. A week before the wedding he contacted the agency looking for his vouchers. He was told that something had gone wrong with his booking but if he departed three days later it would be okay. Paul and his wife reshuffled their dates
but no vouchers appeared and Destiny Holidays moved his trip dates again. The day before the departure date the director admitted that they could not honour the booking and told Paul he would be refunded within seven days. He did not hear anything more despite issuing the company with a summons. Paul has opened a fraud case against the alleged directors of the company in their personal capacities. Doing the right thing TNW tracked down the whistle-blower travel consultant who alerted Sunette’s father. The consultant, who wishes to remain anonymous, says she started to suspect that the company was in financial difficulty last September when there were repeated instances of suppliers not being paid timeously. She said while she didn’t know the extent of the alleged problems she started looking for another job and started to suggest that clients pay suppliers directly rather than deposit funds into the Destiny Holidays account. Salaries were delayed and more payment issues came to light over the following months. She has now found another job and left the company at the beginning of May but says she is still assisting defrauded clients to get in touch with suppliers directly. The Destiny Holidays website has been taken down and the offices have been vacated. Asata confirms that they are not a member. TNW tried to contact the owners, directors and their lawyers but had not received any response at time of going to print.
