A Luxembourg travel agency boss who ripped-off hundreds of customers who bought return flights to Portugal has avoided jail, has to pay back €45,000 and has been fined €5,000.
The Luxembourg court heard that the travel agent cheated Portuguese immigrants with the promise of 'cheap flights to Portugal.'
The former owner of Transline Tours was convicted of misleading advertising and the company, long since wound up, was ordered to pay a fine of €2,000.
The Luxembourg prosecutor's office had requested a year in prison for the former manager of the travel agency, but the court acquitted him of the crime of misconduct but convicted him for lower change of misleading advertising, despite the fact the he had not even chartered an airplane.
The case has dragged on since 2013, when Transline Tours launched a campaign for tickets 'at a fair price' from Luxembourg to Oporto and Lisbon, with posters in Portuguese, radio advertising and a dedicated website.
The flights cost €295 return and were scheduled for July to September 2013, with tickets having to be purchased by February that year.
The agency sold 569 tickets, totaling about €167,000, but in June 2013 the company announced that the flights would not go ahead as the ‘airline contracted had gone bust.’
According to the investigating police, the agency sold the tickets without having any arrangement at all to supply the flights.
The travel agency reimbursed some of those it had scammed and the company was wound up in May 2015.
The remaining 100 or so people who had paid for non-existent flights, might now get reimbursed some four years later.
