When you schedule a vacation, you need to look closely at the policies for refunds and changes.

While you’re probably not booking a trip because you plan to cancel it, life sometimes throws you curveballs.

Like Covid. That was a big curveball.

In today’s story, one person wants to cancel a vacation even after the restrictions are lifted after Covid, but the travel company claims they won’t get a very big refund.

Time to get creative!

Let’s see how they get (most of) their money back.

You’ll lose most of your money if you cancel your holiday with us

I recently had a holiday booked to Mexico which at the time of booking (early 2020), it came to around £2200 for 2 people for 2 weeks.

We felt pretty fortunate to have been able to get that at that sort of price.

Anyway, COVID happened and as you can imagine, the holiday we booked with Tui (British holiday/travel agent) was postponed.

They didn’t want to travel at that time anyway.

Feeling a little anxious to go abroad even when restrictions were lifted, my partner and I decided we wanted to cancel and rebook at another time.

Truth be told, we could have also benefited quite a lot with having some of that money back.

I called them to cancel after a rather lengthy hold to get through to them to be told “Sorry, if you want to cancel, you will lose £2100 of the £2200 that you paid. However, you can make a free of charge amendment and you or we will pay the difference, so if your new holiday is cheaper, we will refund the difference.”

“Okay – let me speak with my partner and see what we want to do.”

Time to do a little research.

Malicious compliance begins.

I have no interest in postponing my holiday so I browse their other destinations on the website.

I phone back the next day:

Me: Hi, I’d like to make an amendment to my booking please.

Tui: Sure no problem, do you have a destination in mind?

They were able to get most of their money back.

Me: Yes, I’ve found this rather appealing location in the Canary Islands which also happens to be your cheapest holiday. Oh and I want to amend it from 2 weeks to your minimum stay.

Tui: Okay, so you’ll get a refund of £1750 and your holiday has now been amended.

After receiving my refund a few days later, I call them and tell them I wish to cancel my new crappy cheap holiday.

At this point I have lost about half of what the crappy cheap holiday would’ve cost.

Instead of losing £2100, I only ended up losing £280.

Granted, it’s still not ideal to have lost out on £280, but it sure it is better than losing most of what I paid!

It’s too bad they didn’t offer a full refund under the unusual circumstances, but at least they got most of their money back.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Rescheduling often works.

This person is glad she played it smart.

Credit card companies can be helpful.

Here’s a tip about dealing with hotel reservations.

That worked out well!

Or as well as it could have, anyway.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.