What can I get back if I have to cancel my holiday myself?

The instinct is to cancel everything immediately and then work out what can be recovered. That is the wrong order: cancelling can crystallise a charge that a date change would have avoided, and it can affect how an insurer treats the claim. Slow down for an afternoon and the recovery is usually much better.

Step by step

1. Check whether the reason is a covered one before doing anything.Travel insurance cancellation cover pays the irrecoverable cancellation charges, but only for the listed reasons — typically illness or injury to you or a close relative, bereavement, redundancy, jury service, being called up, or serious damage to your home. Changing your mind, a change of plans and a foreseeable event are not covered.
2. Get the medical evidence at the time if it is a medical cancellation.The insurer will require a medical certificate confirming that travel was inadvisable, dated around the time you cancelled. Obtaining it retrospectively is much harder, and cancelling first and seeing a doctor later is the most common reason these claims fail.
3. Ask the insurer before you cancel.Many policies require you to cancel as soon as you know, because they pay the cancellation charge that applied at that moment and it usually rises closer to departure. But tell them first, so the claim is opened correctly and they can tell you what evidence they need.
4. Claim refundable taxes and charges on a non-refundable flight.Airport departure tax and certain other charges are only payable if you fly, and are recoverable even on a non-refundable ticket. Airlines rarely offer this and often charge an administration fee, but it is worth claiming on an expensive long-haul ticket.
5. Ask about a date change rather than a cancellation.For flights, hotels and cottages, a change fee plus a fare difference is frequently much less than the cancellation charge, and some suppliers will move a booking without a fee outside a stated window. Ask before you cancel, because after cancelling the option is gone.
6. Read the cancellation scale in the contract.Package operators publish a sliding scale of cancellation charges by how far ahead you cancel. Knowing where you sit on it tells you both what you will lose and what the insurance claim is worth.
7. Check whether the booking can be transferred.The Package Travel Regulations allow a package booking to be transferred to another person in certain circumstances, subject to reasonable costs and notice. It is a genuinely useful and little-known route.
8. Deal with the components you booked separately, separately.Car hire, transfers, excursions and parking each have their own cancellation terms, and several are fully refundable at short notice. Cancel the refundable ones and claim only the rest.

Tips

• If the trip was paid for on a credit card and a supplier refuses a refund it contractually owes, the Section 75 route is available on top of anything else.
• Cancellation cover exists from the day the policy was bought, which is why buying at booking rather than before departure matters so much.
• If you are cancelling because someone else is ill, check whether they had to be a close relative as defined in the policy — the definition is specific and often includes people you would not expect and excludes people you would.

Common mistakes

• Cancelling online first and telling the insurer afterwards — The claim is assessed on the charge that applied when you should reasonably have cancelled, and cancelling without the right evidence in place makes the claim much harder to substantiate.
• Assuming a non-refundable booking means nothing is recoverable — Taxes are recoverable, date changes are often possible, and an insured reason recovers the charge itself.

Questions people ask