[Fuellady]

Cancellation of Route 66 Trip

When the Coronavirus pandemic hit the UK, we suspected that our Route 66 Road Trip would be cancelled, and of course it was. Here’s how our cancellation came about, and how we got on with getting it all sorted out.

On Sunday 15th March, 46 days before we were due to go on holiday Neil received an email from British Airways saying that due to Covid-19 they were cancelling our holiday and we would receive a full refund within 7 days. We were a little surprised, because at this point it had only been announced that holidays due to take place within 30 days would be cancelled. Of course we were extremely disappointed, but had almost resigned ourselves to the fact that it would happen anyway.

We had a day off work the next day, Monday 16th March, so when we got up in the morning we set about starting to cancel everything else that we had already booked for our holiday.

We started with Hotels.com, with the hotels that we had a cancellable rate on - so no problems with those, the money was back in our account the very same day. Other hotel brands that refunded straight away were Marriott and Hilton. True to their word, we had a full monetary refund from BA as well, although it took 8 days, not the 7 they had said but that wasn’t an issue at all.

We also contacted Andy at Discount Florida Car Hire, explaining the situation and again, he was brilliant, with a full refund processed within hours. The ones we thought we would have problems with were the Gateway Arch, and The View Hotel at Monument Valley. In the end they were both great. The Gateway Arch stated no refunds on their website and wouldn’t have been a big loss at under $30 anyway but we sent an email to see what would happen and had an almost instant reply, and a refund a few days later.

The View Hotel at Monument Valley was booked directly with the Navajo Indians who own and run the hotel and the terms stated that we would lose 20% of the amount paid if we cancelled. We understood and respected this and emailed them to cancel, asking only for 80% of what we had paid. We got a lovely email back from them saying that in the circumstances they had refunded the full amount.

We had to wait for the dates to roll around for our bookings with Hotels.com that were on non-refundable rates, as they were only dealing with bookings within 7 days of the date of stay. There was only one that we had a bit of a problem with, as Hotels.com couldn’t get through to the hotel but after a couple of webchats with them we got it sorted out and have now been refunded for every element of our cancelled trip.

As a side note - after a phone call to Tesco Clubcard, we also got all of our points returned for the hotels we had booked using our Clubcard points.

We spent the whole morning that Monday making phone calls and sending emails to start the cancellation process for everything. When we had finished, we decided to go out for lunch to try and cheer ourselves up a bit. I was upstairs getting changed when Neil came charging up the stairs shouting “you’re not going to believe this”. I was thinking what else could go wrong, when he told me that he had just received a second email from British Airways saying that we had been sent the cancellation email in error and our booking was still in place and the trip would go ahead!

Of course, it turns out that the original email was only meant to go to customers whose holidays were booked for the next 30 days. It was too late for us now, as we had already cancelled everything else, so we sent an email back to them explaining that as we had now cancelled all of the other parts of our holiday they should just cancel our flights and refund as promised. As noted above, they did just that with no problems as they obviously realised that they had messed up. It made no difference in the end, as of course we are still in lockdown now so the trip would have been cancelled anyway.

We realise that we have been so lucky with getting our money back, and will absolutely be booking with all of these companies again when we have new dates and are in a position to reschedule our trip.