Cancelled holiday due to lack of internet

[Rainingcatsandog]

We were due to go to the Highlands today for a week. The holiday company informed us that the internet isn't working due to a general issue on the area and they don't know when it will be fixed. I was offered £75 off or the chance to change the date .I took the latter.
I'm now feeling annoyed as I think we should have been offered a full refund.
Does anyone know my rights?

@StrictlyCoffee no! you're meant to one up that answer- eg "shitting in a hole?- that would be a luxury for us. We didnt even have a hole! In fact, we just had a huge pile of shit in the corner of our cottage and we were grateful for it"

I don’t have shit, check your privilege!

You can get internet on cruises, we do. A lot of people are very sneery and dismissive that it’s a waste of money, whilst they buy alcohol packages. I don’t tell them I think spending money to poison their body and piss it down the toilet is a waste so I don’t understand why they have to be so sneery and rude. There’s nothing wrong with wanting internet on holiday nor with being happy without.

Ha! You’d get on well with my husband. he’s away wild camping tonight. I’ve opted out!

@Frequency if you read more than the title, you will see that the OP changed the dates; she didn’t cancel and lose her money.

…she says, whilst posting on the internet on a lovely sunny Sunday…

Most holiday cottage I have been to have a dusty old DVD player lurking under the tv. They often have a cupboard full of board games. Books were around long before kindles.

Then there are the other old standbys like conversation, an evening walk ( especially in Scotland where it is light until very late) , jigsaw puzzles, card games ……….

How sad that people have such limited views of how to entertain themselves that don’t involve electronic intervention. We may be evolving gamers thumbs (joke!) but how much brain cell activity is being lost in the process.

I think if you've taken the change of date then I think that's acceptable if you can swing it, but being offered £75 was awful, I would not accept that.

I hope that when you do get here O P that you get better weather than we're having at the moment . While most of the country is enjoying a heatwave we have high winds and heavy rain. It's not pleasant to be out in I can assure you, even us die hard dog walkers are thinking twice before we do our daily dog walks, lest we get sand blasted or bit by falling trees because the wind is so strong. We are suffering hot nights and wet windy miserable days!

For many holiday cottages, no internet means no tv streaming either and when it as windy as this the electric can go off for hours too. so no tv, no heating, no cooking unless there's a calor gas supply etc The charm soon wears off.

Everyone on the thread saying you can live without it blah , blah, blah .. Yes you can and if it all went down while you were there you would make the best of it, it's a whole different vibe.

May I enquire why it is that you are on a website which involves an electronic invention?

after all there are jigsaws to be done, books to read and walks to be had....

@viques there’s no moral superiority to watching a DVD movie or listening to a radio vs using Netflix and Spotify. The latter is more convenient with greater choice, though.

And the poster you quoted perhaps does not want to go on an evening walk after going on a long walk during the day.

I couldn't spend a week in a place with no internet or phone signal. Not because I'm hermetically sealed to social media but because I'm self-employed and never truly 'off' the job.

I need to be contactable about existing jobs and potential jobs even when on holiday.

Great if you don't have to, but not everyone works in a salaried, office job.

Some of us like to wash, preferably in warm water.

And being practical, if it is remote, and there is an emergency , you could probably get to a phone in an nearby village quite quickly assuming you have a car.

There are none too many pay phones around these days. Do you mean OP could drive somewhere she had a signal? But if she had no signal and no internet, how would she learn about the emergency with eg a family member or her house?

ETA:

For example if there was snow or a flood, either delaying or preventing your journey, would you expect the holiday accommodation to be refunded?

If the accommodation was flooded and therefore unusable, yes. Hopefully the cottage owner would have insurance to cover themselves for this.

If roads were blocked or flooded, so I couldn’t get there, I would look at making a holiday insurance claim.

Here’s how you can do that!

unplugged.rest

Having just got back from an internet-less break in Wales.... Yes I use the internet and social media.... But when I'm away somewhere with no internet (which we regularly do, travelling across Europe in our camper) we somehow manage to not lose our heads, lol.

I read 5-7 books in a week’s holiday. Much lighter to take a kindle (though I have plenty pre loaded on there so wouldn’t need wifi particularly)

And that’s fine, because it’s what you want to do. And now you are back, you want to spend some time on the internet. Which is fine. Just as it’s fine for others to want the internet on holiday for a multitude of reasons.

@SheilaFentiman the OP had been warned there was no WIFI so has time to plan ahead and have things downloaded etc

Almost everywhere you go on holiday takes a bit of planning day to day which is extremely difficult these days without internet.

@sittingonabeach and others - There’s only so much planning ahead you want to do. You want to wait until you are there to choose the best weather day for the loch boat trip. You download a recipe for beef, but the local spar only has chicken. You take an external hard drive, or cables to connect your laptop to a tv (annoying in itself vs just booting up Netflix) but you’ve downloaded a drama and it rained all day so everyone needs cheering up with a comedy. Oops. Your boss sends a work document that she needs an urgent opinion on - it’s 50 pages, that’s a bit of an arse.

Of course some pre-planning can help mitigate effects but it’s ridiculous to pretend - as many are on this thread - that these things aren’t rather a pain in the arse vs having the internet on tap.

Ah, so she did. I missed that bit.

@Rainingcatsandog Check the cancellation policy, but I imagine the week of the booking is too late to cancel and get a full refund, unless you have travel insurance or took insurance when you booked it?

Scottish Highlands aren’t much fun in midge season.

Again, that's why I said 'some'.

Just because you're wild camping it doesn't mean you don't wash in warm water.

So then what was the point of the comment? the OP clearly doesnt find a place with no running water to be "bliss" on holiday so your comment was therefore completely irrelevant.

Thats like a poster asking about how to cook a roast beef dinner and someone replying "some of us are vegan you know" 🙄