Should we pay the balance for our Baltic cruise in May?

Q We postponed a cruise to the Baltic from last year to 15 May this year. The cruise line has now cancelled all cruises until 14 May. I need to pay the balance of nearly £4,000 by 14 February. But we are 66 and, according to the present timetable, are unlikely to have had our second jabs before late May. Should we pay it or lose our £600 deposit?

Name supplied

A Normally my advice would be exactly the same as it has been throughout the coronavirus pandemic: if you can afford to do so, pay the balance.

My reasoning is as follows. While I have no idea what will happen in the next few months, by handing over the remaining cash for your trip, you can be safe in the knowledge that either your trip will go ahead as planned, or it will be cancelled and you can expect a full refund of the whole cost of the trip within two weeks.

Deciding not to pay the balance would mean that you lose the deposit. It may sound a little counter-intuitive to pay out more money to guarantee either a holiday or your money back, but that is the way the system works. It is worth noting that if you decline to pay the balance, thereby breaking the contract, then even if the cruise is subsequently cancelled you do not have a claim against the company.

But it sounds as though you may want to cancel the cruise regardless, because of your inability to complete the vaccination process. If you are reluctant to travel, this places you in a difficult position. You will have to decide between paying over more money on the basis that you expect the trip to be cancelled, or “crystallising” your loss by surrendering the deposit.

My hunch is that the trip is very unlikely to go ahead. A Baltic cruise typically goes past Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Finland and Estonia as well as the “main attraction”, the beautiful Russian city of St Petersburg. The chances of all these countries being willing and able to welcome a ship containing passengers and crew from 100 different nations strikes me as very low.

So in your position, I would first contact the cruise line to ask if you could delay paying the balance. If this does not bear fruit, I believe it would be a wise and low-risk investment to hand over the cash to protect your deposit.

Q By September I expect to be fully vaccinated. Do you feel there will be tests needed travelling to and from Turkey in late September or early October?

Peter E

A I’m delighted to hear about your impending vaccination and the reassurance it will confer. But with February only just having started, predicting rules seven months from now is impossible.

Just think back seven months to 1 August 2020: the summer holiday season was in full swing, or at least as close as it got to normal life last year. Within the UK and in much of the Mediterranean, including Turkey, holiday travel was feasible.

Now we are at a phase in the coronavirus pandemic where the government is putting out social media messages warning that going on holiday is illegal. The travel ambitions of you and me are restricted to how far we can walk from our front doors.

Yet my strong sense is that by early summer the world will be looking much brighter. The rollout of the vaccine will, I hope, reduce the tragically high death rate in the UK, as well as taking pressure off the NHS.  

The UK will be in a position to be more relaxed about people coming and going, and it will no longer be against the law to embark on an adventure.

The other side of the coin: how welcoming will Turkey be to the likes of you and me? Every Mediterranean country is likely to be very keen to attract tourists, at least those who they can be reasonably sure are not carrying coronavirus.

Current medical thinking is that even people who have been vaccinated twice will be able to pass on Covid-19. But some countries and companies are already betting that holidaymakers who have been immunised will present much less of a threat to their populations and customers. Saga Cruises is making a double vaccination a condition of taking a voyage, while Romania will let people in without the need to quarantine if they either present evidence of immunisation, or of having had the virus.  

You ask specifically about testing. By summer, I predict the requirement which has been very popular for a PCR test before departure will be eased and may simply involve a quick test at the airport. If the testing regime is merely one other hurdle on your outbound journey then most of us will happily comply in return for the chance to enjoy the wonders of Turkey.

At present the UK requires everybody to have a PCR test before they come in. But I can see that that requirement is likely to be relaxed as summer approaches. I believe “JOT” – jab or test – will be required.

As you can tell, many uncertainties remain. Fortunately the good thing about your timing is that there will be no shortage of flight seats to Turkey, or hotel rooms there, in late September and early October.  

I suggest that we discuss your plans again much nearer the time – maybe towards the end of August, when things will be a lot clearer. I hope.

Q When you were writing about the UAE flight ban, you wrote: “In Asia/Australasia? Swerve the UAE to avoid strict ‘red list' rules.” But people shouldn’t be travelling anyway: the rule is stay at home and it’s been like that for the last few weeks in the UK. Don’t help people find loopholes. If they are overseas on holiday – tough luck; if they live overseas, then stay there. What’s the problem?

James M

A As you know, from 1pm on Friday flights from United Arab Emirates were banned from the UK. The government says the aim is to reduce the risk of the so-called South African variant of coronavirus coming to Britain. Therefore I wanted to address the situation of tens of thousands of people who are affected by the ban – whether they are British expatriates living in the Gulf or long-stay visitors returning from Asia or Australasia.

Yours was by no means the only critical message on social media; I have also been accused of telling people to fly back via third countries as though that was a crafty trick that I had dreamed up. In fact, I was repeating the message from the government: that any resident in the UK is able to return from the UAE (or any of the 32 other red list countries) but they will need to do so indirectly because all non-stop flights have been grounded.

I agree that air travel enabled Covid-19 to spread around the world with terrifying speed. But that doesn’t affect the reality that many British travellers who have followed the prevailing rules scrupulously are desperate to come home – whether for urgent family matters, education or work.

The UK government believes that pre-departure testing plus 10 days of self-isolation is sufficient for arrivals from the vast majority of countries. I suggest this particularly applies when someone is flying in from one of the many countries in Asia and Australasia with extremely low levels of coronavirus infections.  

Even changing planes for a couple of hours in Abu Dhabi or Dubai is enough to trigger red-list rules. So I recommend to people returning from a low-risk location to travel via a different hub, such as Singapore, to make their quarantine experience less onerous – without increasing the risk they pose to UK residents.

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