To think Jet2 had us over a barrel and shouldn't have charged us £300?

[taptonaria27]

We were due to travel to Rome to watch the rugby this weekend.
The match got postponed last weekend and Jet2 told us that we had two choices, which had to be made before Tuesday morning (3 days before trip).

1. cancel the booking and lose all the money (over £900)
2. change the booking and pay a £150 per head admin fee.

This is all on Sunday which is when we had the time to make the decisions and spend an hour on the phone to them (obviously call volume was high!) so we paid the £300 and changed our trip to one in 2021 when hopefully this will all be over. Not happy at the high cost but didn't want to chuck £900 down the drain and couldn't foresee whether/ when the fco advice would change.

The fco did indeed change their advice on Monday night and on Tuesday afternoon Jet2 cancelled all their Italy flights. So had we waited, we'd have got a refund but only because the situation evolved as it did. If we'd waited and Italy hadn't gone into full lockdown we'd have lost all our money.

Aibu to think that Jet2 should not be profiteering from this situation (their costs to change the booking will not be £300) and that they should waive/ reduce the charge due to the exceptional circumstances?

If the flights hadn't been cancelled you could have just gone and had a weekend break in Rome?

Did you have travel insurance ? Can you claim the £300 back on that ? I have no idea as never needed to but cancellation and curtailment covered in mine - might be worth a call to find out

I would be cross about this too. Last week we had to decide between cancelling a trip and losing most of the money or gambling on the FCO changing their advice. We gambled and all the money is being refunded.

If you had waited until the Monday night, still “before Tuesday” , you would have been OK. You could try saying that their expecting a decision from you so quickly was unfair, but they will probably dispute this.

Our DS had a similar thing with Citrus holidays, they changed dates for free, Jet2 are being very mean.

We changed before the advice as we felt that the situation would evolve as it did we just didn't know when and didn't want to get stuck out there.
When the rugby was first cancelled we did plan just to go and have a nice weekend in Rome but with every day that passes this situation changes

Please call them on 0333 300 0737, I used to work for them in a diff department, explain what you were offered and now you're out of pocket. If you get no joy ask them to message the Team Leader and push. They are generally very good.

When I first saw the title I thought ‘oh did you buy one of their in flight sandwiches’

But in all seriousness OP is it worth trying to speak to them again? You might get a more reasonable person this time.

Put a request for a refund of the £300 on their twitter feed, might shame them into it...

Just ring up and see what they say. They couldn't have known either and might just offer you a refund

Rip off. We just paid about £40 per head to change Easyjet flights.

We called yesterday and tried Twitter too, all they will say is that we agreed to the terms and conditions at the time which is true and so its tough.
We've sent an email to complain so well see if anything comes of that but its not looking likely.
We jumped the gun, we totally accept that but frankly didn't fancy trying to make time on Monday evening to call them as its taken ages each time.

Hmm their admin charges say 35 pounds per person plus the difference in cost between the original flight and the changed one so I'd definitely check that.

Really though it isn't fair for customers to lose money or for companies to lose money when it's down to a virus that no one could have predicted.

The fact is you chose to cancel your booking. The timing of your booking is unfortunate, given the advice changed yesterday

But the fact remains that your decision was a free choice.

Have you tried your travel insurance?

I do sympathise but believe me holiday firms will be on their knees within weeks because of this, there will be job losses etc. If Norwegian is still flying by mid summer I’ll be shocked.