My flight to Tel Aviv has been cancelled and the airline claims there are no staff available to process refund requests. I considered claiming on my travel insurance, but there's a £50 excess I would have to pay. I even thought about no-win, no-fee lawyers, but they take a cut of any reimbursement as well. Looks like I'm going to have to wait until things return to normal in a year's time or something.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, missing out on a holiday pales into insignificance during the pandemic, but it's still a bit of a punch to the gut knowing I'm £285 out of pocket.
Happy to report flight refunds received from Norwegian. Still waiting on a chunky car hire refund, but now feel reasonably confident they will sort this out as well.
If you accept a credit then re-book say a year later the same holiday and in that time the Tour Operator goes but where do you stand ?
You’ll have the same ATOL protection as the original booking.
https://www.travelweekly.co.uk/articles/368192/updated-tui-offers-20-rebooking-bonus
If you accept a credit then re-book say a year later the same holiday and in that time the Tour Operator goes but where do you stand ?
Good news, pleased for you.
We have Norwegian flights booked for July. Please may I ask, when was your original departure date and did Norwegian initiate the cancelling (or was it a FCO thing)?
The refund was for Austin flights for Easter. They cancelled the flight about a month before departure, due to US landing restrictions. I applied for a refund via phone, they then did nothing for a couple of weeks and then sent out an Email with a delay re-book offer or a link to a web form to request a refund. The link was broken, so I called them and they assured me my refund request was logged. When I started this thread I went back on and the link was fixed and it let me submit a refund request. This seems to have been the thing that got things moving.
We also have flights in July this time just out to Stockholm and back via Oslo. I have booked and paid for hotels on a round trip via the Arctic Circle (6 hotels I think). I paid up front as the places we were planning to go are not the sort of places you can just rock up and find a room and I wasn't going to rearrange anything. If the flights are cancelled, as seems likely now, I would expect Norwegian to notify you about a month in advance. I will likely have to fight this one out with Travel Insurance/credit cards for my hotels. Flights I would expect either Norwegian or ABTA to pick up.
Not quite. My 8 year old is penguin mad so we had a penguin experience booked up.
Amazingly, the Ryanair Twitter ChatBot - which I first contacted on April 21st and has been silent despite my occasional prodding - sprang to life today of its own accord and offered to put me on the cash refund list.
It has been a battle - completely of Ryanair's making by deciding to do it the hard way rather than the easy way - but we got there in the end.
I have no illusions - it'll take many months to get the money - but at least I am finally in the cash refund queue.
Thanks for posting this.
I had just about given up hope, but tried again yesterday on the back of your post.
Five minutes later, and I got a response - I am also now in the queue for a cash refund. So relieved and pleased.
I read in the Sunday papers that Ryanair had a backlog of 25 million refunds to work through so don't hold your breath https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/01/ryanair-cut-jobs-coronavirus-grounds-flights-restructuring