Last Thursday, the first creditors’ meeting was held and the administrator, Morgan Kelly from KPMG, reported that $35.1 million was owed by travel wholesaler Excite Holidays to its creditors. He added that it was unlikely that unsecured creditors would receive any return on their money.

According to Travel Weekly, Mr Kelly told the meeting in Sydney that travel agents, of whom there were about 6,000 in Australia, and travel suppliers who had worked with Excite Holidays were owed between $7million and $16 million.

The international companies within the Excite Holidays group were owed $6.5 million, the company employees were owed $1 million and general suppliers were owed $800,000.

The remaining $10.8 million was owed to secured creditors – the National Australia Bank.

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In a statement read at the meeting, Excite Holidays’ executive directors Nicholas Stavropoulos and George Papaioannou expressed “deep regret as to the impact to agents and passenger arrangements over the past few weeks”.

They said in the statement that Excite began to fail in the 2019 financial year “as a result of the market’s increased caution in dealing with non-ATAS channels following several high-profile collapses in the travel industry”. ATAS is the AFTA (Australian Federation of Travel Agents) Travel Accreditation Scheme.

In their statement Mr Stavropoulos and Mr Papaioannou said the company, which had left the ATAS at the end of 2018, had been looking to rejoin but had been hindered by costs.

Excite Holidays was launched from a single office in Sydney in 2002. Over the years it developed a presence in New Zealand, the United States, Thailand, Singapore, Greece, and the United Kingdom.

Mozo reported on its website on 13 January that the company had gone into voluntary administration on 10 January.

A detailed report that would outline the potential outcome for creditors of the companies is to be sent to them towards the end of the first week of February, with a second creditors meeting to be held on or before 17 February, according to Travel Weekly.

Efforts by Neos Kosmos to contact the executive directors of Excite Holidays proved fruitless.