Terms of Service

1. Who you are contracting with

This site and the booking service on it are operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], a [LEGAL FORM, e.g. SARL] with share capital of [SHARE CAPITAL IN FCFA], registered in Cameroon under RCCM number [RCCM NUMBER AND REGISTRY TOWN], taxpayer number [NIU TAXPAYER NUMBER], with its registered office at [REGISTERED OFFICE ADDRESS, CAMEROON]. Telephone [TELEPHONE NUMBER], email info@thelighttravelagency.com. Publication director: [PUBLICATION DIRECTOR].

We hold licence [MINTOUL TOURISM AGENCY LICENCE NUMBER] to operate a travel and stay organisation structure, issued by the administration in charge of tourism and leisure (MINTOUL), and we carry the professional liability and client protection insurance that Cameroonian tourism law requires, under policy [INSURER AND POLICY NUMBER]. Our IATA and BSP agency code is [IATA / BSP AGENCY CODE].

In these terms, "we", "us" and "the agency" mean that company. "You" means the person who creates an account, makes a booking, or pays towards one. "Traveller" means the person named on a ticket, who may or may not be you.

You accept these terms when you create an account or complete a booking. If you do not accept them, do not book. You can reach us at any time at info@thelighttravelagency.com, or by post at the address above, and that is also where a complaint goes.

These terms are published in English and in French, because Cameroonian consumer law requires a standard form contract to be available in both, and both versions are offered as equivalents. If a difference of meaning appears between them, the version in the language you made your booking in is the one that applies to that booking.

2. We are the travel agent. The airline carries you

This is the most important clause in these terms. We are an intermediary. We search fares, hold seats, take your payment and issue tickets on the airline's own ticket stock. We do not operate aircraft, we do not carry you, and we are not a party to your journey.

The contract of carriage is between you and the operating air carrier named on your ticket. It is governed by that airline's own conditions of carriage and tariffs, and by the international conventions that apply to it. Those conditions become part of your contract when the ticket is issued.

We do not treat those conditions as binding on you merely because we mention them. Cameroonian consumer law does not allow a contract to bind a consumer to rules they have not been given, so before you pay we will send you the fare rules of the fare you have chosen and tell you where to read the operating carrier's conditions of carriage in full. Ask us at info@thelighttravelagency.com and you will have them. Your e ticket itself carries the industry Conditions of Contract and the notices that go with them, which we are required to deliver with it and do.

The following are the carrier's to perform, and the carrier is who answers for them under the conventions and under its own conditions:

• The schedule, and any change to it.
• Delay, cancellation, diversion, missed connection and denied boarding.
• Baggage acceptance, handling, delay, damage and loss.
• Downgrade, seating, service on board and refusal of carriage.
• The safety and the operation of the flight.

The following are ours:

• Transmitting your booking and your passenger details to the airline accurately and on time.
• Showing you the fare, the taxes and our service fee before you pay, as one total.
• Taking your payment safely, and returning it in full when a ticket cannot be issued.
• Issuing the ticket you paid for, in the name you gave, and getting it to you.
• Answering you, in English or French, when you write to us.

That division says who does what. It is not a disclaimer, and we will not pretend it is one. Cameroonian law on electronic commerce makes an online seller answerable to its own customer, as of right, for the proper performance of the contract, including the obligations another provider was to perform, saving only force majeure and saving our own recourse against that provider. So where your flight goes wrong you may still come to us, and we will answer you. Nothing in these terms displaces that rule, and no clause below should be read as trying to.

What we cannot do is stand in the carrier's shoes for the claims the law gives you against it by name. Where the Montreal Convention 1999 gives you a claim for death, injury, baggage or delay, or a passenger rights regulation gives you a claim for cancellation or long delay, that claim is against the operating air carrier and only the carrier can settle it. We will give you the booking documents you need and pass the claim on, at no charge, and tell you where it went.

Which passenger rights regulation covers you depends on the flight, not on us, and the answer surprises people. The European rules on cancellation and long delay cover every flight leaving an airport in the European Union, whoever operates it, but cover a flight from Cameroon into the Union only when the operating carrier is a European one. So the same Douala to Paris route is inside those rules on one airline and outside them on another. We will tell you which applies to the flight you are looking at if you ask before you book.

We tell you which airline will actually operate each flight at the moment you reserve, and we tell you if it changes. European law makes that the duty of the ticket seller as much as of the carrier, and it is the kind of thing you should not have to dig for anyway.

3. Your account

An account is identified by a WhatsApp number, an email address, or both. There is no password. Signing in means proving that one of those identifiers is yours, and there are two ways to do it: a one time code we send to the identifier itself, or, where the button is offered, Google.

Continue with Google sends you to Google, and Google tells us the account is yours. What comes back to us is your Google account identifier, your email address, whether Google has verified it, and your name. Nothing else, and no access to anything else in your Google account. It is a convenience and never a requirement: a one time code reaches every account, and an account opened with a code stays reachable with a code. Staff never sign in this way. What Google does at its own end is governed by Google's terms rather than by ours, and the Privacy Policy sets out what we do with what comes back.

Either way, the identifier is the credential. Anyone who can read your messages, your mailbox or your Google account can reach your account, so keep control of all three, and tell us at info@thelighttravelagency.com straight away if you lose any of them.

An account is personal. You may book for other people, and most travellers do, but you are responsible for the details you give us about them and you confirm that you have their permission to give them to us. What we then do with those details is set out in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or close an account used for fraud, for payments that are not the payer's to make, or to attack the service. Where we do, any money we are holding that has not bought a ticket is still returned to the numbers it came from.

4. How a booking is made, and when it becomes a contract

A booking runs through the same steps every time, and each one is a decision you make:

• You search, and we show you live fares from the airlines that fly the route.
• You choose an offer. The price is re confirmed with the airline at that moment, not taken from the search.
• You enter passenger details exactly as they appear on each passport, and you review them.
• You confirm. Only then do we ask the airline to hold the seats, which creates a reservation and a booking reference.
• We issue an invoice for the total, and you settle it by Mobile Money.
• When the invoice is settled in full, the ticket is issued automatically and sent to you.

A reservation is a held seat, not a ticket, and it holds only for as long as the airline allows. Your contract of carriage with the airline comes into existence when the e ticket is issued in the traveller's name, and not before. The e ticket number is the proof of it.

Before you confirm, the review screen shows you the whole order and its total, and lets you go back and correct anything. Cameroonian law on electronic commerce requires that opportunity, and a booking made without it is not validly concluded. We then acknowledge every booking without delay, in writing, by email or on WhatsApp, with the booking reference, the itinerary, the total paid and the e ticket numbers once they exist. Keep it. We archive the booking and can send you a copy at any time for as long as the law requires us to hold it.

We may decline a booking, before a ticket is issued, where the airline refuses the reservation, where the details given are incomplete or plainly wrong, where the fare turns out not to exist, or where we have reason to believe the payment is not the payer's to make. If we decline, everything received is returned in full.

5. Fares, taxes and our service fee

Fares are set by the airlines, not by us. They are live: the same seat can cost more or less an hour later, and a fare shown in a search result is not held for you. This is why the price is confirmed again with the airline at the moment you choose an offer, and again before the ticket is issued.

A fare is only guaranteed once a ticket has been issued at it. If the airline moves the price between your reservation and issuance, we will either issue at the price you paid where the airline still allows it, or tell you the difference and let you choose: pay it, or take a full refund. We never take more money without asking you first.

The price you are shown is the price you pay. It carries the air fare, the taxes, the airport charges and every other unavoidable charge, and it is broken out so you can see which is which. Nothing on this site is pre ticked, nothing is added to your basket that you did not choose, and we do not charge you extra for paying by Mobile Money.

Our service fee is our own charge for the booking service. It is not part of the airline's fare and it does not go to the airline. It is shown separately on the invoice, before you pay anything, and it is included in the total you are asked to settle.

If we cannot issue your ticket, for any reason, the service fee comes back with the fare and you are refunded in full. The same holds if the airline cancels your flight and you take the refund rather than a rerouting: what comes back to you is everything you paid, our fee included. Where it is you who chooses to cancel a ticket that was issued, the airline's fare rules decide what comes back of the fare, and our service fee is not refunded, because the work it paid for was done.

All prices are shown and charged in CFA francs (XAF), inclusive of all taxes, and the total on your invoice is the whole of what you owe us. Cameroonian law requires both, and both are how we would want to sell anyway. Your mobile money operator may charge its own transaction fee on top. That fee is the operator's, it is not shown on our invoice, and none of it reaches us.

6. Paying by Mobile Money

A booking is paid by MTN Mobile Money, against one invoice. You approve the payment on the payer's own phone, in the operator's own prompt. We never see and never ask for a PIN, and nobody from this agency will ever ask you to approve a payment outside the app or to send money to a personal number.

One invoice can be settled from more than one number. A relative can pay part of it from their own phone. Every contribution is recorded against the number it came from, and that is the number it goes back to if it has to.

We do not hold balances. Money you send is either applied to your invoice or returned to you. There is no wallet, no credit and no store of value on this platform. Where a payment has bought an airline ticket, the fare portion is money we hold on trust for the airline until we remit it through the industry settlement plan; it is not ours and it is not available to us for anything else.

An invoice must be settled in full within 60 minutes of being issued. That window is shown on the booking with a countdown, and it exists because the airline's own hold on the seats and on the fare is finite. If the balance is still outstanding when the window closes, the reservation is released and everything received against that invoice is refunded automatically to the numbers that sent it.

Ticketing starts only when the invoice is settled in full. A partly paid invoice buys nothing and holds nothing beyond the window.

Between you and the operator, the operator's own terms apply to the payment itself, including its limits per transaction and per wallet, its own fees, and the fact that a payment you have validated is irrevocable at its end. What the operator does not do is deliver your trip. Once the money has moved, providing what you paid for is our obligation and not the operator's.

Payment records are kept as required by law and are used to reconcile every franc received against a ticket or a refund. Every payment on this platform ends in one or the other.

7. Money that arrives late

Mobile money is not instant, and a payment approved inside the window can be confirmed by the operator just after it closes. A payment confirmed within 10 minutes after the window closed may still be applied to your booking, if the seats can be secured again at the price you paid.

This is a rescue, not a right. If the seats or the fare are gone, the booking does not happen and every franc received is refunded in full to the numbers that sent it. Nothing you pay after the window has closed is guaranteed to buy a ticket, and you should not rely on it.

8. Passenger details, and why the name matters

Every passenger's given names, surname, date of birth, nationality, passport number and passport expiry date must match the passport that will be presented at the airport, exactly as printed on it. Not the name you are called. The name on the document.

A ticket is issued in the name you give us and it is not transferable. If the name on the ticket does not match the travel document, the airline can refuse to carry that passenger, and airlines routinely do. Correcting a name after issuance is the airline's decision, not ours: some allow a correction for a fee, some require the ticket to be reissued, and some require it to be bought again at the fare available on the day.

We check what a computer can check. We check the format, that the passenger's age band matches the date of birth, and that the passport has at least 6 months of validity beyond the return date, which is our default rule. We cannot check that a name is the passenger's, or that a passport is real.

You see every detail you entered on a review screen before we ask the airline for anything. That screen is the last point at which a correction costs nothing. Please use it.

A ticket that cannot be used because the details given were wrong is not refundable by us, and any correction is on the airline's terms and at the airline's price.

9. Passports, visas and health requirements

Making sure that every traveller may lawfully enter, leave and transit every country on the itinerary is the traveller's responsibility, not ours. That includes passport validity, visas and transit visas, onward and return ticket requirements, vaccination and health rules, and anything a destination adds at short notice.

We do not give immigration advice and we cannot check entry requirements for you. Check with the embassy or consulate of every country you will enter or pass through, and with the operating airline, close to the date of travel.

An airline may deny boarding to a passenger who does not hold the documents required for the journey, and a country may refuse entry. Neither is a refundable event, neither is within our control, and the cost of it falls on the traveller.

10. Baggage

Your baggage allowance is set by the operating carrier and depends on the fare, the route and the cabin. It is shown with the offer and on your ticket. Excess baggage, sports equipment and anything outside the allowance is paid to the airline, not to us.

Baggage that is delayed, damaged or lost is the carrier's responsibility. Report it at the airport before you leave the baggage hall and get a written report from the airline's handling agent: the time limits for a claim are short, they are set by the Montreal Convention and by the carrier's own conditions, and a claim made late can be refused for that reason alone.

We will help you find the right address and pass on your booking documents, but the claim is yours against the carrier.

11. Changes, cancellations and refunds

Once a ticket has been issued, what a change or a cancellation costs is decided by the fare rules of the fare you bought. Those rules are the airline's. We do not write them, we cannot waive them, and we do not choose which of them apply to you: the fare you chose did.

Many of the cheapest fares allow no change and no refund at all. Others allow a change for a fee plus any difference in fare. The rules that apply to your ticket are the ones in force when it was issued.

You may cancel a booking yourself, from the booking page, until 24 hours before the first flight departs. Doing so releases the tickets with the airline and returns everything you have paid, our service fee included, to the mobile money numbers it was paid from. The cancellation is final: the seats are gone and the fare is not held for you.

Closer to departure than that, and for a change rather than a cancellation, write to us at info@thelighttravelagency.com or on WhatsApp at +237 6 51 66 69 07 with your booking reference. We will tell you what your fare permits and what it will cost, including any charge of our own for handling it, before anything is charged to you or done to your ticket.

Where the airline does refund a ticket, the money reaches us on the airline's timetable rather than ours. We pass it on to the Mobile Money numbers that paid, in the proportions they paid, within seven days of it reaching us. We do not wait, and we do not keep a refund because a fare rule said the ticket was non refundable and the airline decided otherwise.

Refunds we owe you ourselves are different, and they are automatic. Where a ticket was never issued, where the settlement window closed unpaid, where issuance failed and could not be rescued, or where we declined the booking, everything received goes back to the numbers it came from without you having to ask.

None of the above touches the statutory right of withdrawal that buying online can give you. That right has its own clause, next, and where it applies it applies whatever a fare rule says.

12. Your right to withdraw after buying online

Cameroonian law on electronic commerce gives a consumer who buys online fifteen working days to withdraw, without giving a reason and without penalty, and three months instead of fifteen days if the seller did not give the required information. Tell us at info@thelighttravelagency.com, on any durable medium, with your booking reference. A refund owed on withdrawal is due within fifteen days, free of charge, by the same means the payment came in, which for us means back to the Mobile Money numbers that paid.

This is a right Cameroonian law gives and European law does not. The European cooling off period that covers most online purchases expressly does not reach passenger transport, so a traveller in the European Union or the United Kingdom has no fourteen day right to cancel a flight. What they have instead is the fare rules, and the passenger rights against the carrier described above.

The one limit worth knowing before you book: that right does not extend to a service whose performance has already begun with your agreement. Issuing a ticket is performance. When you settle your invoice you are asking us to issue immediately, because that is the only way the seats and the fare survive, and issuance normally follows within minutes. So the practical position is that withdrawal reaches a booking we have not yet ticketed, and that once your e ticket exists what governs is the fare rules and the clause above.

If you want to preserve the right rather than the seat, say so at info@thelighttravelagency.com before you pay, and we will hold the booking rather than issue against it. It may not survive the airline's own deadline, and we will tell you if it will not.

This clause states our understanding of a right that Cameroonian law does not spell out for air tickets, and we would rather be plain about that than confident and wrong. If you believe you may withdraw and we disagree, write to us: nothing here shortens a statutory period or takes away a right a court would give you.

13. When the airline changes or cancels your flight

Airlines move and cancel flights. When the airline tells us, we tell you, by email and on WhatsApp, at the contact details on your booking. Keep them current: a schedule change we cannot deliver is a flight you find out about at the airport.

What you are then entitled to, being rerouting, a refund, care, assistance or compensation, is a matter between you and the operating carrier under its conditions of carriage and under any passenger rights regulation that applies to your flight. We will make the request to the airline on your behalf where we can, but we cannot pay a carrier's compensation for it and we cannot compel it to pay.

A refund the airline agrees to reaches you through us, to the Mobile Money numbers that paid, once the airline has actually paid it.

14. Using this service properly

When you use this site, you agree not to:

• Book, or attempt to book, using a payment instrument that is not yours to use.
• Give details of a person who has not agreed to travel or to being named.
• Make speculative or duplicate reservations you do not intend to pay for.
• Scrape, mine or automate against the search, or work around the rate limits that protect it.
• Interfere with the service, its security, or any other user's booking.

Fare content on this site is licensed to us by the airlines and their distribution systems, and is not yours to republish. Everything else on the site, including its text, design and code, is ours.

We may refuse a booking, suspend an account and report a transaction to the operator and to the authorities where we have grounds to believe an offence has been committed. Cameroonian law on cybersecurity and cybercriminality treats payment fraud and unauthorised access as criminal matters, and so do we.

Travel agencies are named in the CEMAC rules against money laundering and terrorist financing as a profession that must know who it is dealing with. So we may ask you to confirm your identity before or after a booking, we must report a transaction that looks suspicious to the national financial intelligence unit, and the law forbids us from telling you when we have. It is not a judgement about you; it is a duty that attaches to the trade.

15. Events outside anyone's control

Neither we nor you are liable for failing to do something that becomes impossible because of an event beyond reasonable control. That includes closed or restricted airspace, war, civil unrest, terrorism, natural disaster, epidemic, an act of government, an airline or airport strike, and the failure of a mobile money, telecommunications or electricity network.

The money promise survives all of it. If a ticket cannot be issued, whatever the reason, everything you paid comes back to the numbers it came from. What we are not liable for is the onward cost of the disruption: a hotel booked for a night you did not spend, a connection on a separate ticket, a missed appointment.

16. Liability, and why there is no cap in these terms

Most terms of service put a ceiling on the seller's liability here. These do not, and the reason is not generosity. Cameroonian consumer protection law makes void any clause that excludes, reduces or limits a supplier's liability, or that cuts down the warranties of the contract, and a court may strike such a clause of its own motion. A cap written into this page would be unenforceable against a consumer, and printing one anyway would only mislead the person reading it.

So the position is the ordinary one under Cameroonian law. We answer for our own service. If we transmit your details wrongly, take your money and neither ticket nor refund it, issue the wrong ticket, or cause you loss by failing to take reasonable care, that is ours. And under the electronic commerce rule described earlier, we answer to you as of right for the proper performance of your booking, including the parts another provider was to perform, unless the cause was force majeure.

For the avoidance of any doubt, nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for:

• Death or personal injury caused by our fault.
• Fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.
• Anything else that the law does not allow to be excluded or limited.

What we cannot be is the carrier. Liability for the carriage itself, including death, injury, delay and baggage, rests with the operating air carrier under the Montreal Convention 1999 and its own conditions. Nothing here limits your rights against that carrier, and nothing here could: those rights are not ours to give away.

We carry the professional liability and client protection insurance that Cameroonian tourism law requires of an agency, which covers, among other things, the extra cost you bear if a provider we booked through fails to perform. The policy details are in the first clause of these terms.

If you are a consumer resident outside Cameroon, none of this affects the rights you hold under the consumer law of your own country that cannot be signed away. Where a clause of these terms conflicts with such a right, the right wins and the rest of these terms stands.

17. Complaints and disputes

Write to us first, at info@thelighttravelagency.com, with your booking reference and what happened. We aim to answer substantively within seven working days, and to tell you within that time if something needs longer.

A complaint about the flight itself, meaning delay, cancellation, denied boarding, baggage or anything that happened at the airport or on board, has to go to the operating carrier, because the carrier is the party that owes you the answer. Send it to us anyway if you would rather: we will pass it on with your booking documents and tell you where it went.

If we cannot resolve a complaint between us, you keep every right you have to take the matter to the administration in charge of consumer affairs (the Ministry of Trade), to the consumer recourse bodies Cameroonian consumer law provides for, or to the courts. A complaint to us is never a condition of any of that, and it never shortens a time limit.

These terms contain no arbitration clause. Cameroonian consumer law voids a one sided one, and we would rather leave you the courts than write a clause that cannot hold.

18. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of a booking made under them, are governed by the law of the Republic of Cameroon.

The Cameroonian courts are competent, and we do not name one of them to the exclusion of the rest. Cameroonian procedure already lets a dispute of this kind be brought where the contract was made or where it was performed, as well as where the defendant is established, and a clause narrowing that would be a clause taking a right away from you.

If you are a consumer resident outside Cameroon, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the law of your own country of residence, nor of any right you have to bring proceedings in the courts of that country. Where those rules give you more than these terms do, they apply.

Your contract of carriage with the airline is a separate contract, governed by the airline's own conditions and by the conventions that apply to it, and it may point somewhere else entirely.

19. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms, and we will, as the service grows and as the law moves. The version that governs a booking is the version in force on the day the booking was made, and that version does not change under you afterwards.

When we make a change that materially affects your rights, we will post the new version here with a new effective date and tell account holders about it by email, on WhatsApp or in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date is acceptance of the new version. If you would rather not accept it, you can stop using the service and close your account, and any booking already ticketed is unaffected.

20. How to reach us

[LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED OFFICE ADDRESS, CAMEROON]. By email at info@thelighttravelagency.com, and on WhatsApp at +237 6 51 66 69 07. We answer in English and in French.

For anything about your personal data, including a request to see it, correct it or delete it, write to [DATA PROTECTION CONTACT EMAIL]. The Privacy Policy explains what we hold and why.