Country banned Brits from entering. Zero reimbursement from travel agent. What do we do?

stormywhether

Morning, everyone. Thank you for bothering with this post. It's much appreciated during these agonising times.
We had saved up for three years for a special holiday. We hadn't been on holiday for three years and it was time for a special trip.

We'd booked our travel insurance, done everything right. Apart from booking the holiday with Voyage Prive.

In the week before our holiday the FCO announced it was advising against non-essential travel. Then The Maldivian Government said it was banning British citizens from entering the islands.

We told Voyage Prive of these developments and received a formal response telling us to cancel our own holiday and in return we would receive a travel credit.

I was aware of The Package Travel Regulations and knew that they were legally obliged to provide a refund in situations such as these.

We sent about half a dozen emails insisting on the refund and each time the company replied and became increasingly belligerent. Then there was nothing.

While we expected as per the statutory instrument mentioned above that we would receive a refund within the 14-day timescales for doing so, without that guarantee we initiated a chargeback claim. We had booked by Visa Debit. When that was rejected, and we had heard nothing from Voyage Prive, we were allowed to start our travel insurance claim.

CoverForYou, our insurer, then said they didn't cover package holidays. It wasn't a cheap policy - and I was flabbergasted to discover that such policies existed.

We have heard nothing since from Voyage Prive and it has been almost three weeks since our holiday would have ended.

We know these are exceptional times but equally Voyage Prive has had every opportunity to abide by the law and return our monies for services that were rendered null and void by authorities not allowing the holiday to take place.

Can anyone advise on our options here? Do we go down the 'claim monies through the courts' route or is there another way that is likely to see us receive anything at all from this mess?
Thanks again for your time!

[Deleted User]

it seems you overwhelmed Voyage Prive a little with your bombardment of emails at a difficult time. 

Go back to them, but calmly this time and just the once, and ask when they think the credit might be processed.


Once you have that, review your options for a refund.

Browntoa

Did you cancel the holiday , or did they ? 

It does make a crucial difference

Alan_Bowen

Yes, that last comment is vital. Reading your initial post it looks as though you may have cancelled, not the other way around but there are lots of complaints about the company and providing you didn't cancel you should be able to make a chargeback against the debit card. Why was the bank refusing to re-credit you?