Horrible money choice - do we accept we've just lost £1.5k or do we have options - WWYD?

[bintofbohemia]

Horrible situation. We sold our house last year and are living in rented accomodation until DH gets a permanent job and we can move away from where we are.We have a bit of money in the bank as a deposit for when we can buy again.

We've not had a holiday since before we had children four years ago and in a fit of fed upness and despair we decided to sell my car and booked flights to go on holiday in the summer with the proceeds.

Problem is, we must have been insane at the time, it will cost more than the money I would get from the sale and DH's contract is coming to an end so we'll have a month or so of him not earning. We weren't told at the time of booking that the tickets were non refundable and we can't do anything about it. We also can't claim on the insurance because he hadn't been at his job long enough to qualify.

We have 3 choices:

1. Cancel and lose the money entirely (but complain as the t&cs were not read to us at the time. Odds are this will be a total waste of time though as we've got nowhere so far.)

1. Go and spend half of the deposit we have saved for a house

1. Go and put it on a credit card, have the experience and assume things will be better financially when I can get a job and we'll deal with it then.

I know 1 is the sensible option, but it's a sickener. I can't believe we've got ourselves into this, how fricking stupid. If we don't go we've wasted money that would have paid for a family holiday in Europe for two weeks, and as it stands we're going to get no holiday and feel really stupid and sick about it into the bargain.

WWYD?

thank you all for all the feedback. We've just had a sit down and a really good chat about all the options. Ideally we want to get the £1500 back, but if we can't, we might be able to get go anyway with a combination of credit and selling the van (which should cover most of it.)

(expletive - I do have a bad fear of flying which can only be worse with two very young sons with me, reckon you could get out of it on the basis of panic attacks?!)

We thought of changing the dates on the flights but there's an admin fee of about £100 for any changes so we'd be lookign at $400 to make a change. If we get the tax back we're looking at about £200 ish. Lame.

We're going to just appeal again and make a lot of the fact that they were a bit inept, didn't make us aware, charged ud the wrong amount initially and ticketed it for 4 adults, instead of 2...

Thanks again. WIll let you know how we get on.

Where are you going? Culd you try and find out about house swaps or something like that - or go camping at your destination? Would be cheaper!