Travel question: Can we cancel our flight and get a refund after Sri Lanka travel ban?

Q I have recently booked a £5,000 holiday to Sri Lanka, departing in October. With the news that the island is off-limits according to the Foreign Office, surely we can cancel and get a full refund? But the travel company says no. What are our rights?

A Yesterday afternoon, five days after the murderous attacks in Sri Lanka, the Foreign Office added the Indian Ocean nation to its no-go list. It joins North Korea, Venezuela and much of Iraq as somewhere where the FCO advises against “all but essential travel”.

Your right to cancel depends on when you are due to travel. Abta, the travel association, says: “Customers who are due to travel imminently to the island on package holidays will be offered options of deferring their date of travel, transferring to another destination or a full refund.”

I think it is reasonable to define “imminently” as within the next week. When no-go advice is issued for a country, the initial response from travel companies is to deal with people due to travel in the next few days.

They also hope, naturally, that they will be able to operate the holiday. At the time he increased the warning, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “Our hope is that it will be possible to change this when the current security operation has concluded.”

Typically there are “rolling” cancellations – with companies announcing that all departures up to a particular date will be cancelled. I would not be surprised to see, in the next day or two, leading travel firms saying they will offer refunds to anyone booked up to the end of May. If the ban stays in place until, say, the third week of May, that could extend to the end of June. But there is no legal stipulation about what tour operators must offer if they are still hoping to run the trip.

Some travel firms will be prepared to offer alternative destinations. So if you would be happy to travel to, say, India or Thailand, talk to your travel provider.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder