Trouble in Egypt, no-frills flights and getting a refund from Kenya Airways

Q I’ve just seen the alerts about Egypt. I travel out to Hurghada in nine weeks and now I’m extremely worried about what’s going on out there. Do you honestly think we should change our holiday or wait to see what happens?

Carol B

A Hurghada and the area around it on Egypt’s Red Sea coast is lovely in late September. The intense heat has dissipated, along with the crowds. But aviation between the UK and Egypt has taken another twist. Around 1,500 British Airways passengers have found that the airline has cancelled all its flights from Heathrow to Cairo and back between now and Saturday 27 July because of heightened security concerns.

The circumstances indicate to me that there is intelligence available to European governments about a specific threat involving UK-bound flights departing from Cairo airport. EgyptAir is continuing to fly twice daily between Heathrow and Cairo, and many BA passengers have been transferred to the Egyptian airline. Crucially, flights on Thomas Cook and easyJet to and from Hurghada airport, the main Egyptian gateway from the UK, have continued as normal.

Unless the Foreign Office itself grounds planes, as it has done in the case of Sharm el Sheikh airport since November 2015, then normal conditions will apply to flight bookings. Passengers will not be able to cancel without losing some or all of their money.

The same goes for people like you with package holidays booked to Egypt: there is no legal right to a refund or to be switched to different destinations, but you may find they are prepared to be flexible. While you can’t expect your money back, if the tour operator has space available in other destinations, you may get a sympathetic hearing and be allowed to switch.

Personally, I would stick to Egypt – but I would be very careful on the roads, which I regard as the biggest source of danger to travellers.

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Q Airlines seem to be having a “race to the bottom” to make passengers pay for all the extras we used to take for granted. Is this not a marketing opportunity for an airline to make a virtue of having inclusive fares again, saying: “We might cost a bit more but you’ll enjoy the experience, treat yourself”?

Peter C

A The trajectory in aviation over the past quarter century has been “disaggregation” – asking travellers to pay only for the services they need – and I can’t see anything turning that around any time soon. The trend was started by easyJet, who trained us not to expect a full meal and drinks service free of charge when flying between London and Scotland – but in return halved the prevailing fares charged by British Airways and British Midland.

For a couple of decades, BA clung to the idea of providing complimentary catering, but then decided to turn in-flight food and drink into a revenue stream rather than a cost – at least in short-haul economy. In 2006, Flybe was the first airline worldwide to start charging for checked baggage, and now hundreds of carriers do the same – including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic in short- and long-haul economy, with their “basic” fares.

Sure, there are some outliers; all other things being equal, I will fly TAP Portugal to Lisbon and Turkish Airlines to Istanbul, because they offer excellent meal services (and free alcohol). I enjoy the nostalgia of complimentary catering on BA’s Moscow run – which has the airs and graces of a long-haul route. But if easyJet or someone else offers me a significantly lower fare, I will take it. And the problem, for any airline which does as you suggest, is that I think the overwhelming majority of people will do the same.

If anything, you can expect more frills to be stripped away and charged for. In the unlikely event I were to buy a long-haul business-class flight, I really wouldn’t want the baggage allowance to equal my body weight, and would faintly resent paying for other people’s. And I would flatly refuse a limousine on the grounds that the Tube is preferable on environmental grounds.

I predict that some business-class fares will start to be sold without frills, with the principle of paying extra for extras extended.

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Q My wife and I booked flights from Manchester to Nairobi through a company called Omega Flightstore. The flights were with Kenya Airways. The journey out went without a hitch, flying from Manchester to Amsterdam on KLM with a Kenya Airways flight number, then the onward flight to Nairobi.

The return journey was a totally different story. The flight was to be a two-step flight, flying on Precision Air from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, a connection to KLM to Amsterdam and another to Manchester. But the first flight was late. At Dar they said that the gate was closed and they wouldn’t let us board the plane. So we were stuck. We had to get Tanzanian visas at the airport and be put up in a hotel for the night. We were left there for all of the next day, having to keep contacting the airline to try to find out what was going on.

Eventually, after I contacted Kenya Airways’ head office, we were booked on a flight back to Nairobi and put on an overnight KLM flight to Amsterdam. We arrived home 24 hours late. I had to pay again for pre-booked onward travel home to Anglesey, and we both lost a day’s work. Who can I complain to and what compensation can we expect?

David S

A Your are welcome to complain to Precision Air for triggering this unfortunate chain of events, but I don’t think you can expect much in the way of compensation from any of the parties involved. The online travel agent Omega Flightstore has ceased trading since you booked. Your itinerary was ticketed through Kenya Airways, rather than its partner KLM. As the Kenyan carrier is a non-EU airline, it is not covered by European air passengers’ rights rules on flights originating outside the EU. (With a KLM ticket, you may have been able to argue that the Dutch airline was responsible through its code-share arrangement.)

As it is, you have provable financial losses which in theory you can claim under the terms of the Montreal Convention, which governs international air travel worldwide. By all means try claiming from Precision Air, based in Tanzania, by emailing the evidence to contactcentre@precisionairtz.com. But if your claim is declined (or ignored), I am not sure how you would proceed. At that point I would aim to put a stressful and expensive experience like this behind me – though you might find that your travel insurance is able to provide some recompense.

For future bookings to Africa, you might aim for simplicity – I try to limit the number of hops, to reduce the amount of potential problems.

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