You have various ways to find out this information. The fact that a company exists on the Companies House Register does not establish whether that is the same company with whom you have a contract. Companies often have multiple subsidiaries, siblings, parents, agents, and/or affiliates, and in most cases you have no right to sue any of those entities other than the one with whom you have the contract.
What you can do is the following:
- Check the terms and conditions that you agreed to at the time you made the booking. This will usually contain the company's information and should be your first port of call. If you find the information here, you don't need to do anything else.
- If it does not, and you agreed to those terms via a website, check the website itself for any information. If the company is in E&W then Regulation 25 of the The Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 (the "Disclosure Regs") requires them to state their registered number and registered office address on their website.
- You can also check any emails which the company sent you when you made the booking. Regulation 24 of the Disclosure Regs requires the company to disclose its registered name (from which you can compare against the Companies House Register) on "all other forms of its business correspondence". Regulation 25 (see above) also applies to "business letters".
- If you still cannot find the information, you can make a request for disclosure under Regulation 27 for the registered office address. As they will have to respond by way of correspondence and/or letter, it is implied that the response will also need to contain their name and registered number (see Regs 24 and 25 above). They must reply within 5 working days.
- A breach of any of the above requirements is a criminal offence for the company and its directors per Regulation 28.
- Be aware that the above rules assume that the company is in fact an E&W entity.
- You can also make a subject access request to the company you have found on Companies House, under Articles 15(1) and 15(3) of the UK GDPR (as defined in sections 3(10) and 205(4) of the Data Protection Act 2018). Make sure to explicitly ask for (1) confirmation as to whether or not you entered into a contract with that company, and (2) a copy of such contract. If they respond then the answer will reveal whether you have identified the correct company.
- You can also make a request under Article 13(1) which provides that "where personal data relating to a data subject are collected from the data subject, the controller shall, at the time when personal data are obtained, provide the data subject with all of the following information: (a) the identity and the contact details of the controller [...]" but do note that they will have already satisfied this requirement if they already gave you the information in the contract or elsewhere.
Of course there is always the possibility they will fail to respond to comply with all of the above. In that case, your recourse can include the following:
- A complaint to Companies House for the company law breaches.
- A complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office for the GDPR breaches.
- An application to the court for a compliance order under Section 167 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
Note also that the Civil Procedure Rules do permit service on addresses out of the jurisdiction in some circumstances. See Rule 6.6, 6.11, Section IV of Part 6, and Practice Direction 6B. You should read all of that to see if any of it applies to your situation.
If you do have a copy of the contract, you should also check for the jurisdiction and governing law clauses (if any). These set out respectively, which country's courts handle any dispute, and which country's laws apply. They may expressly permit you to issue the claim in E&W (in which case see whether or not CPR Rule 6.11 above applies). For example, I recently had to issue a claim against Ryanair for non-payment of a refund for a cancelled flight. Their contract specifies:
You are entitled to bring a claim against us in your local court,
except that Irish courts shall have exclusive jurisdiction in relation
to claims under EU Regulation 261/2004 where you have not complied
with clauses 15.2.1 to 15.2.8 of these Terms and in relation to
non-consumer (i.e., business to business) claims.
