Thursday, 1 October 2020

Our Sweden Trip - Cancelled :(

 Since we arrived back in Australia, we have been planning our return to Sweden for a holiday.  In December 2019 we booked it all in - 2 weeks in Sweden and a 20 day drive through Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France.

We booked travel insurance to cover any risk of cancellation due to injury (we were going the week after rugby grand final) and paid pretty much everything in advance to make sure it was all covered.  We then saved hard to make sure we had plenty of spending money.

Then Covid-19 came along.

As I said in my post on 24 May 2020, we were forced to cancel our trip because the borders were closed due to Covid.  South Australia was relatively Covid free, and as such was preventing travel outside of the borders and country except for essential travel.

We held on for as long as we could, but as our travel dates approached we started to realize that we needed to cancel.  Unfortunately as we had paid for travel insurance we didn't pay the extra costs on flights and accommodation to allow for cancellation or changing of dates.  Our travel insurance had a clause stating that pandemics were not covered, so we were not going to be able to make any claims there.

As of 24 May we had managed to cancel all accommodation, but still held the useless travel insurance and the flights.  We lost about $750 on accommodation -one hotel offered us a voucher for the value of stay usable for the next few years instead of a refund, and a campground we were staying at was our biggest loss.

The insurance company initially refused to refund the policy as it was past the 14 day cooling off, but eventually agreed to cover us for the 'unused' part of the policy and we were refunded $660 of our initial $710.

We contacted the travel company about cancelling our flights, but the policy stated we would lose about 75% of the total price to fees if we cancelled - because we didn't take the extra cancellation coverage due to having travel insurance.  This worried us for quite a while until the airline eventually cancelled the flights in late August.  Because of the cancellation, we were refunded the full cost of our tickets.

So, the bad news was that we had to cancel the trip we were planning and excited about, the good news is that we ended up only about $1000 out of pocket on $20,000 of bookings, so we are ready and waiting for the borders to open again so we can travel.

Of course we need to wait until everything is safe again, we also have Alana's Year 11 next year and I have some concerns about the prices of flights once they are able to restart.  But hopefully this time next year we will have some good updates on our return trip.

Until then, rugby continues to fill our weekends, with the boys and I having an extended season due to the initial Covid shutdown and finals in a few weeks.  Tomas is also playing in the regional comp.

Hopefully we will be able to take some time traveling in the state.

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