Holiday Cottage cancelled within 1.5h of check-in - What are my rights?

Don't except the first offer.
Execpt it, get a plan and go anywhere.

I would ask to see a copy of the said certificate

As you hadn't actually arrived at the time, I'd say full refund and some compensation will be the best you can get

Does it have an electric shower?
Tell then to turn the gas off at the mains, take a camping stove, get them to refund you 50%
Proceed with previous plan.

Can't advise about rights - other than to reject first offer.
Suggest you call Crabtree & Crabtree as they manage holiday lets in Northumberland and the Borders; used them before - very good.
If you find some alternative accommodation and it's more expensive, factor that into your compensation demand.

is it a private person doing this or a corporate thing ? That would affect my answer greatly..

WWSTWD?!

Sausages, Bombers or Shoes

You could message Drac as he's a local and may have some contacts or suggestions.

If you're getting a full refund plus some extra then I think that's pretty much your lot regarding your rights. It's quite possible there is no alternative accommodation available

How many people and have you already travelled?

Not sure about rights but I would try finding an alternative yourself and then asking them to pay the difference plus some compensation.

Given timescales Airbnb would probably be the best for finding somewhere available quickly. I have just done a search and there does look to be some available properties in the area.

I have used cottages.com in the past and been happy with their service but not had an issue like this. I would have thought that they would have some policy/procedure in place for issues like this.

The Youth Hostel in Alnwick is worth checking out and it's conveniently near to the Tanners' Arms.

Thanks for the thoughts so far folks.

This is through Cottages.com, so not exactly a small outfit...

We're 2 adults, a 5yo and a 2yo - so we're currently trying to pretend to the kids that nothing is going on, while desperately trying to find some alternatives!

Given that the time between the cottage being cancelled and check-in is only 90 minutes, I think it's fully to be expected that we have travelled...

Also embrace the situation and do whatever becomes available. serendipity, best laid plans all that jazz.

Get on the phone to Croquet Cottages. Explain the situation and see if they can help. They have loads of holiday lets in the local area and will know about last minute cancellations you may be able to take up.

Edit, lovely looking place available in Amble starting today for 7 nights, Amble is a cracking little town with brilliant access to the best beaches.
https://coquetcottages.co.uk/northumberland-holiday-cottages/queen-street-hideaway/

I think it’s fully to be expected that we have travelled

Depends how far you're going 😀

Crabtree & Crabtree have at least one property in/near Alnwick available from today.

Go for one of those above and if they are more than the refund + compensation offer ask them to cover the difference as a minimum.

I'd be taking a drive past the cancelled property and if it's occupied, hammer some frozen wee into their chimney or, err, something

We often use Sykes Cottages and I’ve just had a quick look on their page – 4 properties for Alnwick that would meet your needs, one is ridiculously expensive, the others around £1000, which is still dear for 7 nights in my book but might work for you.

I guess your rights will be defined in the T & Cs and cancellation policy.

What a 'sh1tter' - hope you find something fast.

Not great timing but unexpected things do happen.

Rights wise it’s what’s in the T&C’s which will probably only cover refund of the booking. Be careful of going in with both feet as the compensation may stop being on the table.

Booking.com - some approaching £1,600 plus for the week, although The Schooner Hotel is just over a grand for 4 for a week in Alnmouth - at least there is availability, even if for a night or two until you find something.

The Schooner Hotel is just over a grand for 4 for a week in Alnmouth

As the The Schooner, officially the most haunted hotel in Britain. Even if ghosts don't scare you, the quality of the food should. The place is shocking. So shocking that Trading Standards took them to court last year.

Don't make a bad situation worse by going there!

We turned up in Windermere once, collected the keys to the cottage but when we got there it had flooded inside!

Luckily Cottages.com did have something free - was in Coniston, so they just gave us that.

OP here.

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions, help, advice etc. Knew I could rely on you lot!

We've now booked somewhere through Sykes, which is only moderately outrageously expensive. Now to do battle with Cottages.com for some form of compensation...

Good luck.

Oh bummer that is a nightmare story. Glad you got sorted. Lovely place to be though so you’ll hopefully soon put it behind you. Had a lovely weekend in amble a couple of weeks ago in an Airbnb place but obviously that was before school holidays had started and would possibly be too small for your needs.
First beer tonight will slip down easily I reckon!😂

Youth Hostel ffs. So cringe its almost funny.

Sausages, Bombers or Shoes

Isn't this the one time when "kicking the back doors in" could be used.

I would (of course) check the T&C's of your original booking before speaking to them re: compensation and then it can inform you of what profile to adopt when speaking to them.

I.e. have they breached their own terms in an outrageous way or just a little bit (or at all).

pootler - pleased you've got an alternative sorted.
Enjoy!

Sounds like a good alternative OP.

Youth Hostel ffs. So cringe its almost funny.

Have you been to a YH in the last 20 years? Sone of them are really nice now, private ensuite rooms, good food...

As a above, t&C's first. But you can expect language to say full refund or alternative if available.
There will likely also be a limitation of indirect or consequential loss, could be iro 100-125% of price paid to mitigate the argument of travel expenses incurred.
Ianal
I'd do it when you get home though, but you may also see t&c time limitations for making a complaint.

Anyone else think it odd that you would have your gas safe certificate renewed every year in the middle of the busiest period of the year.

If you are close by in the new place I'd be driving past to have a look.

My thought too. Only an idiot owner would be having safety checks done on change over day peak season. Very risky.

Glad the OP sorted, lovely area. We've stayed in cottage on a farm close to Alnwick a couple of times.

Sone of them are really nice now, private ensuite rooms, good food…

I suppose it really depends on your expectations... I find them expensive, rule bound, and generally dire. When they were cheap and you had to arrive on a horse/canoe/shanks and clean the bogs before getting chucked out, at least you got what you paid (little) for. Now they're in the leisure sector, cost the same as other much nicer accom and serve prison style mass catering.

Only as an absolute last resort and definitely not for the annual family holiday.

I think this is the owner cancellation text

9 Cancellations by us, the owner or service providers
If we or the owner, Novasol A/S or the service provider cancel your booking or are prevented from providing the
accommodation you have booked, you may choose to:
 accept alternative accommodation – you will have to pay any difference in price if the cost of the new
accommodation is higher or be reimbursed the difference if the cost of the new accommodation is lower;
 request a voucher with a redemption value equal to the amount previously paid by you for the booking – the
voucher terms and conditions will be available before you make your choice under this clause; or
 obtain a refund of the amount already paid by you for the booking.
We will contact you to inform you of these options.

That cancellation text is poor and is the minimum I would expect.

Did you pay by credit card - they may have a full refund policy.

It might be their cancellation text, but frankly, with no warning, thats an unfair term. They can't expect someone to find fresh accomodation with 1.5h notice. They're effectively cancelling your holiday once you've fuly committed other costs. I bet if you try to cancel, the t&c on you are far more onerous.

As such, for £80, it might be worth Moneyclaims online later on. Trivial costs to you, should be nil costs in the event you lose.

But I also think its highly likely at peak season, there's no issue with the cert. The property has just probably been booked, by the owner, outside Cottages.com, to a higher paying family. They need a "technicality" to cancel with zero notice.

I'd be checking out the occupation if I was passing, and taking photos of any signs of occupation to support my claim for damages.

I’d go further and if I saw the property occupied I’d knock on the door and ask them who they booked through (ooh this is such a lovely property, I tried to book it but it was already booked… etc)

Anyone else think it odd that you would have your gas safe certificate renewed every year in the middle of the busiest period of the year.

Indeed. It's also shoddy that the property owner has had 12 months since the last certification to arrange a new one, but seemingly can't manage that task...

It's perfectly possible that the certification has beeen postponed from a "better" time of year due to Covid / staff shortages etc

It’s perfectly possible that the certification has beeen postponed from a “better” time of year due to Covid / staff shortages etc

This is what I was going to say, a certain British Gas company stopped providing them at all over Covid even if you were paying for landlord service. So everyone was madly scrambling to get them done!

They either need to put you in suitable alternative - or compensate you for all your losses.
And don't take any offer the make initially - Consult a solicitor.

With 90 minutes to go?

I know about Hanlon's razor and all that.... but it's very very difficult not to smell bullshit here.

Naff news but better not to be dead

Go through all the websites you can, compo sounds reasonable so far, see what you can get and ask them to pay the difference (within reason)

You could message Drac as he’s a local and may have some contacts or suggestions.

Not any with space until after Xmas. Although there may be some space in a friend’s  campsite, that has bell tents. Maybe they can pay for the OP to stay there for few days until they can fix the issue.

With 90 minutes to go?

I know about Hanlon’s razor and all that…. but it’s very very difficult not to smell bullshit here.

Not at all - I could very easily see this situation happening.

Declaration - we run a holiday cottage effectively in our garden. But use Sykes, not Cottages.com

It's worth understanding how these firms work. They own nothing. They rent nothing. They are merely an agent - putting punters and owners together and charging circa 20% from the owner and a booking fee from the customer. So not really that different to Airbnb. They will not 'have' other accommodation to put someone in - merely other owners on their books that might have vacancies.

As an owner this is your worst nightmare. You not only loose the booking money but you have to pay a penalty too - i.e. the compensation is not really coming from cottages.com but from the owner. From memory it's tiered from how far out you let someone down. When my mum was running the one we run now and my dad died (and she wasn't in a position to do the changeover), the cancellation fee for the next guests was a few hundred pounds, on top of obviously paying back the booking.

But it's entirely imaginable that this could happen. You don't want to disturb guests whilst they are in so book maintenance and safety checks in on changeover day. If you have a failed gas safety cert you just have no choice but to cancel - there is no winging it. With Skyes you have to have a valid cert uploaded on their portal or your property closes - oddly they don't just take your word for it. You wouldn't want to stay somewhere where they did wing it would you?

Where there got this wrong was booking the gas safety checks for high season. If possible you'd book it in for where you had a couple of empty weeks, normally in the low season, so if something went wrong there was time to sort or at least give longer notice. You'd have to really hope there was a good reason for planning it when they did.

I hope the new property works out for you OP. But yes, in this situation with you well on the way to getting there, I would hope cottages.com would go beyond their standard T&Cs - at at least look more favourably at covering the cost of the new place that they state in their terms. However, they were by some margin the worst of the cottage letting companies when covid hit, retaining money way beyond reasonable and not answering the phone to customers or owners for weeks. They lost a lot of owners after that and confessed to be being very poorly prepared. Heads rolled. I'd not hold my breath sadly.

I have to say Cottages.com very promptly refunded our holiday in November 2020 within 1 week after the government announced the second lockdown. It seems like most of the rental cottage industry did struggle with refunds at first, but most of them got their act together.

In fact, Skyes took longer than Hoseasons (owners of Cottages.com) to get their refund policy sorted out.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2020/07/sykes-cottages-reverses-coroanvirus-refund-policy-after-regulato/

What happened to the OP?

Did they get away?

Based on a post last week - yes but nothing since.
I'm sure they'll be along with an update soon.

OP here to provide a happy end to the story.

We managed to book somewhere last minute with Sykes cottages (thanks whoever mentioned that above as an option) and had a great week in Alwnick and the area.

Cottages.com initially offered 40% compensation in addition to a refund, although they were very sniffy about it and alleged that they didn't have to offer anything other than a straight refund. I rejected their compensation offer on the basis that it didn't even cover the additional cost of the last-minute cottage I'd had to book. In the end, they increased the compensation offer to cover it, so I wasn't left out of pocket (other than my stress levels!)

For those thinking of going to Northumberland on holiday, I wouldn't bother - as everyone on here keeps saying, it's rubbish! 😉

Oh, and there's no salacious end involving bombers and frozen sausages either. I walked past the cancelled cottage a couple of times during the week and it seemed empty on both occasions. Also, our last-minute cottage had a gas inspection on the last day, so perhaps it's not so unusual after all?!?

Also, our last-minute cottage had a gas inspection on the last day, so perhaps it’s not so unusual after all?!?

Stupidity and lack of forethought are certainly not unusual it seems. Glad you had a great time and aren't out of pocket.

Stupidity and lack of forethought are certainly not unusual it seems. Glad you had a great time and aren’t out of pocket.

My guess is this goes back to the 2020 lockdown. Gas safety certs are like MOTs - annual and most people tend to leave it until the last one is about to run out. There will be a whole load of folk who got there 2020 check delayed and had it done as they reopened in the summer of 2020. If you were wise, you'd not wait for it to expire in 21 and 22 but do it early and change the annual cycle back. Gas engineer availability for doing the sensible thing might be a limiting factor here I guess.

Glad you got that resolved OP and had a good time - I'd be very interested to know who paid your enhanced compensation - if cottages.com swallowed it or if they went back to the owner for more....

But did you go to the Tanners’ Arms?