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This may be a situation a few of you are in. There's probably customers and sellers of accommodation on here so will welcome both aspects of this.
The scenario is we had our ski holiday cancelled due to covid-19. The last and most significant cost to us to recoup is the accommodation. I requested a refund from the reasonably large French company we were dealing with after being offered a refund voucher to the value we paid for our accommodation and services. They have since come back saying no refund, referencing 'Force majeure', but they will book us the same week at the same price next year.
We would still like a refund but according to the French Government order we'll have to wait 18 months before we can apply for this. We paid by credit card. Its an independent booking. We have insurance.
Does anyone have a more informed opinion on this?
The basis of this enquiry is the future uncertainties of the situation and we'd rather have the money in our possession to use in future at a time of our choosing. We like the accommodation provider and their product. We are likely to use them again.
If you have insurance then what is the question? You claim off them and it's up to them if they can get it back from elsewhere. Isn't that the point? I know it's tempting to try and sort it yourself but if you have insurance then you should just go straight to them
You also paid on a CC, so I’d be contacting the CC company to ask about a refund
Depends on if the accommodation provider could not honour your booking or if you didn't go because the resort was closed. It’s rubbish either way, and probably one for insurance or cc rather than pursuing it yourself. Good luck.
The resort was closed and the accommodation were also told to close. Subsequently borders were closed and flights were cancelled so wouldn’t have been able to get there anyway.
It would be easier just to get the refund but I’ll investigate the CC and the insurance route. I now have the correspondence from the accommodation stating their position which is handy.
Why not just take the booking for next year, in theory it will save you money.
Or go through your insurance
In the same situation but with a small chalet company. Have logged it with the insurance company, no progress at all yet though. Assuming at this point the money is lost.
Also have an interesting situation with the carpark booking, cancelled this a month ago, got an email confirming a refund less a fee. Yesterday got a new email saying they changed their minds and issued a voucher. By this point I'd already lodged a complaint with the credit card company!
I’ve just received the final refund from our Italian ski trip that didn’t happen. Refunds from Easyjet, KLM and Booking.com. The latter were the easiest to deal with. I think I’ll use a package company next year.
In a similar situation, a group of us were going to France on May 8th for 2 nights. Due to the impending virus, we never paid the full balance, only £75 a head deposit.
The restaurant, and the ferry have been good, they said come next year, we'll give you a credit note, which is fine, as we said we'd just do it a year late.
The hotel is being a right pain. They said in March that the hotel will be open in May, which was very optimistic. France has now said lockdown until May 11th.
The hotel have now said we'll have to wait until May 11th for a decision, as there is no one working. Right.
We have received refunds for our all elements of out independently booked ski trip, except for Euro-tunnel (voucher) and 25% of the return (Zeebrugge-Hull) ferry crossing, again, a voucher. 75% was refunded. The refunds for the liftpasses took longest, but we'd booked these in August 2019.
I did read a story last week about a group that had paid 17k for a French ski chalet who wouldn't refund the money.
The chalet is basically saying "we're still open, the fact you can't get here or the resort is shut, is irrelevant"🤦♂️
The Nd of that co said they were a small co and hadn't the money to refund
Air BnB have been easiest to get a refund from innitially it was a credit but at expense of waving a load of rights. It was a 10 person villa we booked so a fair chunk of change I wasn't leaving in a tourism companies coffers through a time like this.
Jet 2 won't even speak to us.
The Nd of that co said they were a small co and hadn’t the money to refund
And the people had insurance, they just didn't want the hassle of claiming on it :). This is the point of insurance really. Lots of people including the company have costs they can't recover and insurance companies are happy to take that risk for them for a fee.
Insurance wont pay out if an alternative offer has been made so you're not out of pocket technically. The fact its not your preferred choice or it's not convenient for you is not relevant...it's about not being out of pocket..insurance is there for scenario's where you are not adequately compensated financially.
Airlines wont refund either and in cases where the might have done it, it is purely at their discretion. They have their backsides covered and if you looked at the T&C's of the ticket it would say something along the lines of the airline trying all 'reasonable efforts' to re-book you but not necessarily give you a full refund and not necessarily cash but instead credit. If the airline is facing bankruptcy (which they mostly are) they're not going to start dishing out cash which they actually don't have to refund tickets. Also part of your ticket price is for costs the airline has already paid out for in order to deliver the service in the first place like aircraft costs, insurances, fuel hedging, slot costs etc. This is where insurance kicks in.
Insurance wont pay out if an alternative offer has been made so you’re not out of pocket technically. The fact its not your preferred choice or it’s not convenient for you is not relevant…it’s about not being out of pocket..insurance is there for scenario’s where you are not adequately compensated financially.
Not sure that’s quite right. An insurer won’t pay out if you can simply cancel and get a refund. A credit note to be taken at some future time, is not a refund. For some people a credit note is good enough - for others it is not going to be useful, e.g. the airline no longer flies to the nearby airport; your children will have left home (or be more expensive); or have exams that make a holiday difficult; you aren’t sure the company will survive to let you use it; You are now pregnant, ill, changed job, lost job etc. I don’t believe any insurer will refuse to pay simply because you could rebook for a future date.
My annual travel insurance policy has been writing to all customers (I have no need to claim) saying anything booked before WHO declared a pandemic (late Feb?) is covered, anything after that was “foreseeable”. You should claim from provider and credit card co first if appropriate then show them that it’s not been resolved and they will pay.
As an aside, I’d say whilst most activities will have returned to some sort of normality by early 2021; I’m not convinced that Ski holidays in the Alps will be business as usual next year. For whoever said you’ll save money by rebooking with 2020 prices - I suspect you are wrong. I suspect demand in 2021 will be down: economic impact, travel hassle, health risk (real or perceived), brexit travel concerns (and brexit economic concerns), and people who’s summer holiday plans get screwed up too. On the other hand suppliers will be keen to secure bookings and cash flow so I’d be surprised if they weren’t offering very keen prices for filling their order books to make the bank etc feel happy to prop them up now!
I'm in the same situation as the op. Accom won't refund, booking.com were useless, called insurance and sat on hold for 2 hours then got cut off. Logged it with CC and waiting to see if they pay out, if not will try insurance again.
P&O ferries have refused to refund even though they actually didn't run our actual crossing, they just said we could re-book another time and pay the difference, which we don't want to do as their prices fluctuate so much that it could still end up costing us another £200....
Tunnel we've moved into August for a pound and if we don't use that we'll move it to next winter.
Shit situation as I'm out if pocket about a grand at the moment. Patiently waiting and hoping though....
We accepted the offer of rebooking next year. Cheap flights on easyJet at the moment so taken a punt on things being improved next Feb.......
Airlines wont refund either and in cases where the might have done it, it is purely at their discretion. They have their backsides covered and if you looked at the T&C’s of the ticket it would say something along the lines of the airline trying all ‘reasonable efforts’ to re-book you but not necessarily give you a full refund and not necessarily cash but instead credit. If the airline is facing bankruptcy (which they mostly are) they’re not going to start dishing out cash which they actually don’t have to refund tickets.
Really? I’ve had payouts from KLM and easyJet; I’d be surprised that they would have if they hadn’t absolutely had to.
Hey my 2 cents - I'm very aware of this situation from both sides.. however without any waffle I'd say this..
If you have insurance and you like the company you booked with.. then please use your insurance. A lot of companies are going to go under with this either this year or next.
Even offering a voucher they have already had 80% of the costs paid out already for the current season so next year when they provide your vouchered holiday they are just incurring further costs.
If you need the money back then obviously escalate it via any means you see fit (in your case most likely CC provider)
If you’ve paid any part of a transaction valued between £100 and £30000 by credit card, asked for a refund from the merchant and they’ve refused request the refund from the credit card company. Both are jointly liable for breach of contracts for goods and services paid via CC but not delivered.
No ifs or buts it’s the law.
A view from the other side. As a small accommodation provider in the Highlands this has screwed is over. Cash drains massively over the winter and you’re then looking at Easter onwards to start building funds back up again. That’s obviously not going to happen so we literally have no funds whatsoever. If the full season goes (which it may do) no idea how we will get through next winter. We’ve pushed the business bank loan back for a few months, sold as much personal stuff as we can and cut every other expenditure we can. I’ve also got a job at the local Coop which pays part
of the family food bill.
The £10k council grant will be here soon’ish which will see us through 6 weeks of business costs (insurance, gas, electricity, telephony, staff salaries* and so on).
*2 of our staff are covered by the furlough scheme so that money will come back At some point. 3rd staff member not covered so I’ve had to cover last 3 weeks of ‘furlough’ out of
my own pocket and make him redundant. We are even more screwed now, him too.
We have offered to move all bookings forward and carry the deposits etc across. If we had to pay all deposits back we’d be out of businesss in no time, 5 jobs lost, 3 staff with no accommodation, a family homeless and everyone with a holiday booked even worse off. Most people are very understanding so far.
It’s a brutal situation all round for anyone in a similar situation. Easy to point fingers etc. if you’re in full time employment with a guaranteed income or two although I understand not all of our customers are.
Anyhoo, hope that adds another perspective. Off out on the not mountain bike to enjoy the sun.
TS