“When the facts change, I change my mind.” (Attributed, possibly incorrectly, to John Maynard Keynes.)
When I started this blog in January of this year I had high hopes of having by now completed a number of trips to provide plenty of material for regular blog posts. When it became clear in March 2020 that I was going nowhere, I felt forced to reduce the frequency of posting from weekly to monthly, as there is a limited amount I can drag from my memory about past trips.
I have maintained a map on this site showing the places visited each year. For 2020, rather than an anticipated record number of places being marked there is just one blob shown for London. It is not that I have not left the London area this year, just none of my trips have met the criterion of spending at least a couple of hours exploring a town or city. In the summer I went on some long walks in the Essex countryside, including a 17 mile circular tour of The Rodings, a group of eight villages, seeking out each of their churches. I’ve also been to Oxford twice, dropping-off and picking up my son from his first term at university – but on each visit, due to Covid restrictions, only half an hour was spent in the city.
In my May blogpost, I reported on my aborted plans and my attempts to get my money back from the advance bookings that I had already made. I can now provide an update on this:
- For Europe Explored Trip 1 no further cash refunds have been forthcoming. I did receive an email in October from Trenitalia saying that they have not forgotten about me, but nine months after I requested it (and over a year since I booked) a refund has not been received.
- I put in an insurance claim for Europe Explored Trip 1 to AXA Insurance, who handle the claims from my policy with Coverwise. They initially refused even to look at my claim, continually repeating a mantra that because the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had advised that refunds were due on trips that could not be fulfilled, the responsibility lay with the travel provider and not the insurer. This ignored the reality that the CMA has no authority over non-UK companies. Since AXA would not pay out when vouchers had been offered (even though there was no guarantee that it would be possible to use the vouchers before they expired), the value of the claim was under £50, given that the policy had a £125 excess. Eventually, I did get AXA to look at the claim about two months after I submitted it. They then started procrastinating again, with a variety of excuses, such as they were waiting for authorisation to make the payment. The final straw was when they emailed me again, apparently mixing up my case with someone else’s, by asking for totally irrelevant information that did not relate to my cancelled trip. At this point I submitted a formal complaint via their complaints procedure and started Tweeting publicly about my problems. This seemed to do the trick, as the next day I received a phone call (the first and only phone call I had in my dealings with them), agreeing to pay my claim (less the value of vouchers received) plus an additional £50 compensation for my troubles.
- At the time of my previous update in May, I had received refunds or vouchers for all of my Europe Explored Trip 2 bookings. I subsequently managed to get the two vouchers I had received (from SNCF and Brittany Ferries) converted into cash refunds.
- Europe Explored Trip 3 to Poland and the Ukraine was being combined with a family holiday, so the sums at stake were larger. However, given my experience with my insurance claim for Trip 1, I concluded that I was unlikely to get much of a refund from the insurance policy that I had bought for this trip (especially since the excess was applied per person). So before the planned departure date I agreed with the insurance company to cancel the policy for an 80% refund of the premium paid. I managed to get some cash refunds for this trip, including for all our flights with Ryanair, even though the return flight from Lviv operated as scheduled. However, I still only have vouchers for a couple of hotels in Krakow and Lviv, which need to be used by the end of 2021.
2020 has been a difficult and frustrating year, but I do realise that I am in a more fortunate position than many people affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. One thinks that things can only get better in 2021, but I am not confident that there will be a return to anything like normality any time soon, and worry about the long term damage the pandemic will have caused to the economies of Europe. Additionally, the folly of Brexit will make travelling from the UK to the rest Europe somewhat more difficult.
Here’s hoping for a better 2021!
Europe Explored 