Question re refunding flight tickets for medical reasons

beckprot

Hello all, I was wondering whether anyone could help me out, as I've been googling with no success!

We booked tickets via Easyjet approximately 6 months ago to take our boys on their first skiing holiday this coming February. Unfortunately in October my eldest was found to have a tumour inside his shin bone (thankfully non-cancerous!). This meant that he had to have a fairly large operation to remove the tumour and has now been left with a large hole inside the bone which will take up to a year to heal. As you can imagine, the doctors treating him have said "absolutely not" to the idea of him skiing!

On trying to get a refund from Easyjet, I have found that they will not refund tickets for medical reasons, only change them at a cost of approx £65 per ticket, and considering the tickets only cost about £50 each in the first place, I'm not really willing to pay an extra £300 odd on top...

We paid for the tickets by credit card - does anyone know if its possible to get a credit card refund for medical reasons? I don't want to contact them until I have a reasonable idea of whether they'll pay up or not! I'd be really grateful if anyone could advise me, thank you!

discoinferno_99

First of all, sorry to hear about your son. Hopefully he is well on the mend.

I don't believe you can do much via your credit card unless there is a specific policy that your card issuer has for such a thing. In such circumstances, claiming on travel insurance for the cancelled trip would be the appropriate way to get some money back. If you don't have this, then I suspect you will be out of luck.

The final option would be to try to find someone within Easyjet to appeal to as a gesture of good will. Sadly the budget airlines don't appear to allow their staff to action things with any common sense or good nature, but you never know!

Amys

It may be worth checking to see if you have a card that offers holiday/travel indurance as part fo the package, quite a few do.

MidlandsMum

Yep, this is an insurance claim. If you dont have any you will be out of luck. Easyjet's website would have offered you reasonable cover at the time of booking. If you declined this there would have been small print to say you must buy your own cover as they do not refund for illness.

delwynshd

if you have not got travel insurance then your out of luck really, you wont get it back

sorry

Moonchild

Surely as it's a Skiing holiday you have travel insurance?

And you must have got it already as half the benefit of travel insurance is cancellation cover??

And if not, sorry.

I'm not being facetious, but know nothing about ski-ing or ski resorts, but are you going to a place that he can have fun without skiing? Or possibly keep the flights and go somewhere else nearby - i.e. beach / lake / some kind of centre parks?? Just a (possibly not helpful) thought.

beckprot

Thank you all for all your replies! No, me being a bit of an idiot didn't bother taking out travel insurance at that time - to be honest it had never occurred to me that I might need to claim on it before we went, I had planned to arrange it a week or so before we left. I suppose in my head I was thinking it was just for in case any of us injured ourselves on holiday!

Obviously I know better now! I will check to see if there is travel insurance included on the credit card, hadn't thought of that.

Moonchild - thank you for the suggestion about still going - I had considered that, but its quite a remote skiing village as far as I'm aware with not a lot else to do, and I think it would just be mean to take him there and not let him do anything - he's like the worlds most active kid!

Once again, thanks all for your advice - I'll let you know if I have any success!