Can anything be done about our cancelled rooms?

Q Help! Our accommodation has been cancelled. We booked our favourite hotel in Icmeler, Turkey, through an online travel agent which apparently contracts with a “bed bank”. We have now been told the hotel is under new ownership and has cancelled all bookings with online agents. However, you can book rooms on Booking.com at a more expensive price. I would have thought they had a contract with holiday companies and should honour the deal or be in breach of contract. What can we do?

Beryl K

A I am afraid that by choosing to book a room through an online travel agent, you opened up the risk that your booking would be cancelled arbitrarily with little recourse. Online travel agents typically insist (in small letters at the foot of their home page): “Your contract will be with the provider of your chosen travel service”.

So you inadvertently struck a contract not with the agent but with the bed bank. This middleman does its own bit of buck-passing, saying something like: “We accept no responsibility for the provision of the product.” In other words: “Got a problem? Talk to the hotel.”

While I am not an expert on consumer law in Turkey, I imagine the property in Icmeler has a term along the lines of: “We can cancel your booking if we like.” I don’t advise that you bother to test this in a Turkish court.

The hotel may well have broken its contract with the bed bank, but the latter is likely to conclude that it doesn’t want to take court action when all it stands to lose from the breach is a bit of commission.

Contrast this with a proper package holiday, with flights and accommodation booked at the same time. Under UK law, your tour operator would either have to provide the accommodation as booked (and you can be pretty sure that the holiday firm would have a robust contract with the hotel) or it must find you an acceptable equivalent.

As it is, all I can do is agree with you that morally you should be able to hang on to your reservation, but legally you cannot.

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