As a little experiment, I engaged the services of a TA with a hotel booking for the trip I had planned for April. I cancelled that trip in December and so cancelled that booking.
I had paid a deposit of $100. This has still not been refunded some twelve weeks after I cancelled.
I have been in touch with the TA and they give me the strong impression that $100 is a trivial sum and I should stop making such a fuss. The money will filter through eventually and it’s really not a big deal.
Would you ever write off $100 because it’s not worth it to you?
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This is very odd to me. Did you pay the deposit directly to the TA? As a TA, I don’t take any money directly from travelers - I use their card to pay deposit to Disney/Universal/whoever, but the money never is in my hands. I don’t get paid until they travel.
That said - no, $100 is not trivial and shouldn’t be treated as such.
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I gave them my credit card. They paid a third party using it.
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If $100 isn’t a big deal, they can refund you themselves.
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I would hound them for a $10 deposit.
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What does this mean? That you’ll get the refund in due time, and you should just be patient?
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If this was fully refundable deposit then I would be chasing them for it.
Was it a U.K. based TA or a US based one? If they are a UK agency then I’m sure there must be a way to escalate it - ATOL, ABTA etc. Either way I would email asking them for the refund to be paid within x days, as per their T&Cs.
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Yes.
When I’ve booked UOR hotels direct and cancelled, I get a refund within a week.
US
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What third party did they pay? Sounds like you got scammed. That is not how TAs work.
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It depends on how much effort / stress getting it back would cause. In your case, I would keep hounding them.
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If I had to cancel a $5000 vacation minus a $100 fee, I could live with that. If all I gave them was $100 and it was marketed as refundable, I’d expect it a back.
That said. Depending on what else we going on in my life I might walk away. I would probably not make more than a few calls. And then rate them poorly anywhere I had access.
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I would hunt it down.
I’m still sore about a £40 loss from pandemic cancellations, which in gave up on, but wish I hadn’t and I’m currently still chasing £30 from IKEA.
Look after the pennies…
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Disney still owes me $250 from when they cancelled my DLR AP due to covid. I chased it for years and finally gave up. They say “we refunded it to the card”, Chase says bullshit. My cc number did not change. I went round and round for years and despite elevating it at Disney…I finally admitted defeat and gave up. I am okay with this (clearly, I keep giving them more money despite it), but only because I had not planned on using the AP at all during the time the parks were shut down, I had already completed my trips. But it still makes me mad.
I would keep trying to get this $100 back though, for awhile at least.
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I still remember when I was studying at Stirling and went to Aberdeen with a Scottish friend to visit her mom. We had tea and scones at some little place. They had foil wrapped pats of butter. Being mindful of eating extra calories and only what I wanted, I used about 2/3 of my pat of butter on my scone (yummy btw). My friend’s mom could not deal with that and reached over and scraped the rest of the butter off the foil and added it to her already completely buttered scone. My friend and her mom, went on to tell me that the Scots are very much about “waste not, want not”!
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That, and we also like a little bit of scone with our butter 
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I would chase it. It’s a lot to me and I track nearly every penny that we spend. If I was told it was refundable, I would expect it back in 5-10 business days. If it wasn’t back by then, I would be incessantly contacting my TA.
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Umm, she/he is not a very good TA if they aren’t calling to get your $100 back. It’s not a trivial amount of money and you should have already gotten that credit back on your credit card.
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My grocery store owes me $14 and I’m about to make a follow-up call about that so yeah, I’d be calling on a regular basis about the $100.
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