Losing any money at all obviously sucks, but if you gotta lose some, it’s better that it’s as little money as possible.

That’s the calculation this person made and they found a pretty clever way to lose as little money as possible.

Check out what happened!

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 £2,200 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.

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.

What?!?!

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 £2,100 of the £2,200 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.”

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?

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 £1,750 and your holiday has now been amended.

Well, that worked out!

After receiving my refund a few days later, I call them and tell them I wish to cancel my new cheap holiday. At this point I have lost about half of what the 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!”

Reddit users spoke up.

This person shared their thoughts.

Another reader weighed in.

This Reddit user spoke up.

Another individual dropped some knowledge.

Better to lose a couple hundred bucks than a whole boatload of money…

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.