Do I have to pay more for my rescheduled flights?

Q I have booked a holiday next June to Zante with my husband and paid a deposit. The flights were with Thomas Cook but have now been rescheduled with Jet2.

I received an email today from the holiday company saying if I want to fly out on the same day I must pay another £145 each. Surely this cannot be right: another nearly £300 on the price of the holiday? My contract is with the holiday company – can they just change it? They have offered a free refund.

Beverley C

A The collapse of Thomas Cook continues to rumble on. The giant travel firm went bust 12 weeks ago. The failure, which cost the jobs of 9,000 people in the UK alone, continues to cause problems for holidaymakers (not least the 50,000-plus who have yet to get a refund on future bookings).

Tens of thousands of travellers are in the same position as you: booking holidays with other holiday companies, with flights that were planned to be with Thomas Cook Airlines.

When the travel firm collapsed, it took the airline with it – leaving holiday companies with a problem. With a significant supply of “third-party seats” being taken out of the market, it was inevitable that costs for the air-travel segment would rise.

At this stage, holiday companies can do one of two things. The ideal, from the traveller’s point of view, is that the replacement flights are secured at no extra cost. More typically, the customer may be asked to pay more for the trip. If they choose not to do so, they are entitled – as your firm has indicated – to claim a full refund.

While you do have a contract with the holiday company, if circumstances change dramatically then they can ask you for significantly more cash. It is up to you whether to accept or to try to find an alternative holiday.

I agree this is a far-from-ideal position, but the nature of travel is that you and I commit well in advance to the promise of a trip. And as you and I found, even the greatest name in travel can let you down.

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Q I am travelling to Bilbao soon for a family event. I was booking flights for my daughter and me on easyJet. I was going through all the guff about seats, car hire, food vouchers, etc, etc, but when I finally got to the payment stage a message appeared to say my flights had increased by £12 during my booking process.

I have never seen this with easyJet or any other website. It did give me the choice to continue or not, but as the other airline that flies to Bilbao was much more expensive I didn’t have much choice. Is this allowed?

Rachel P

A Yes, it is legal – as long as the airline has genuinely sold the last couple of tickets at the previous price while you were booking.

It appears you were going through the genuine easyJet site, rather than one of the online agents who sometimes intervene in bookings and pretend that the fare has gone up even when it hasn’t.

I imagine that when you saw the price online, it said something like, “Only two seats remaining at this fare”. If you see something like that, and you are happy with the cost, then, of course, you should complete the booking as expeditiously as possible. But from what I know of the way the easyJet system operates: it is likely that someone else had already selected those two tickets very shortly before you did. They remain in the reservation system as “available” because quite often prospective purchasers will abandon the booking process late on.

So only when someone has clicked to pay, and the transaction has gone through, do the seats become unavailable. I agree this is very annoying. It happens most frequently when a tranche of easyJet tickets goes on sale for school holiday dates. In future, it is a really good idea to have a login already registered with the airline so that plenty of your data is stored, meaning that you can complete the deal before anyone else gets in the way.

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Q In the summer my family and I travelled to Menorca with Thomas Cook. On our return, our flight was delayed for over three hours. We all put in a claim. But now they’ve gone bust, who deals with any compensation claims?

Name supplied

A I am afraid that you are what’s known as unsecured creditors: it appears that Thomas Cook owes you money, under the European air passengers’ rights rules – around £350 per person. But the debt is unsecured, ie not tied to any particular asset. So you are among the creditors owed collectively some £3bn. The administrators are selling off what they can of the collapsed travel giant, but so far they have raised only a few tens of millions for airport slots and the sale of the Thomas Cook brand.

Suppose the total recovered by the administrators reaches £100m. The rules for how this is apportioned are complicated and depend on other claims to the cash. But if it were divided among all the creditors in proportion to the amount they can prove they were owed, they would get, roughly, 3p for every £1 owed. In your case, that would mean about £10 each.

You could theoretically apply for that, but I fear your original claim is in a mountain of pending paperwork at Thomas Cook that was never dealt with. So even staking a claim would be difficult. If you have time to file a claim, including filling in a proof of debt form. But otherwise, I suggest you just stick with the memory of a hopefully happy trip to Menorca.

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