Do travel firm owe me a refund after drone chaos?

Q Unfortunately, along with a travel group I was caught at Gatwick on Thursday by the drone-related closure. The holiday was Atol protected, and involved flights on easyJet.

The travel firm said there was nothing they could do to help us, and that we should leave the airport. No-one was offered any support in any way. By the following day the company was ringing us all to say that they had tried to find alternative flights but had drawn a blank.

They said they would refund the cost of the easyJet flights which the airline was refunding to them, but the rest they said would be down to our insurance policies. But some people are left with no apparent way to recover the not insubstantial cost of the holiday in full. Do you have any advice?

Name withheld

A For three key days at Britain’s second busiest airport – 19 to 21 December – around 1,000 flights were cancelled because of drone intrusions on the airfield. You were among more than 150,000 passengers whose flights were cancelled, at a time of year when finding alternative travel options would inevitably prove extremely difficult as most other flights were fully booked. Unlike in some previous episodes of large-scale mayhem, easyJet did not lay on “rescue” flights to help with the backlog.

Yet as always at times of flight disruption, travellers on proper package holidays were in the strongest position. While they might lose their holidays, they would get all their money back.

Because you have an Atol certificate, I infer that you booked a proper package holiday: flights and accommodation bought in the same transaction. That means you are protected by the Package Travel Regulations 2018. They specify that if “the organiser is prevented from performing the contract” (i.e. providing the holiday) “because of unavoidable and extraordinary circumstances” (which I think we agree pertained at Gatwick) then the traveller gets all their money back but no additional compensation.

Your account of the travel firm’s attitude is completely at odds with my reading of the regulations. On a typical week’s package holiday at this time of year, perhaps priced at £700, air fares are unlikely to make up even half of the cost. So the holiday company will have to bear quite a loss for the remainder. But the law requires it to do so.

I cannot imagine that an insurance firm that looked into the details of the cancellation would readily agree to pay up – and even it did, there would often be an excess which would mean an incomplete refund.

If, for some reason, I am mistaken about the package – for example it is a non-compliant trip you bought before the latest rules took effect this summer – then I still wouldn’t consider insurance as the best solution. Instead, assuming you paid by debit or credit card, contact the issuer and ask for either a chargeback (for debit transactions) or say you are claiming via Section 75 (for credit card payments).

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