14 May?

[MummaGiles]

What is the significance of this date? Center Parcs has just extended its closure to 14 May, which is the same date that TUI/First Choice and Jet 2 have cancelled all holidays until.

I can’t work out what the significance is. Are some schools on holiday the week after? I thought the Whit holiday started a week later.

It’s 4 wks tomorrow but other than that I don’t know either

jet2 is cancelled to the 15th june is it not

Oh maybe it wasn’t Jet 2 but there was definitely another tour or flight operator working to that date

Center Parcs contact centre is closed until May 14 so maybe that suggests the actual Parcs will be closed until well after then.

First Choice are just prioritising contacting customers who were due to travel in or before 14 May.

These companies will not get to hear anything about further restrictions or the lifting of restrictions before the general population. Nothing to read into that date.

one of the cobra meetings?

they will all need a good deep clean, restocking, recruitment and staff catch ups on all training before they re-open.

it won't be instant

My birthday! Other than that I don't know.

Not sure that’s true about first choice prioritising pre-14 May customers. We are booked in the period between 14/5 and 17/6 when they are supposedly restarting flights and our holiday is still apparently due to go ahead, so not officially cancelled, although I’m not sure how they think it’s going to happen.

It's Tui that have given that date. Nothing significant, it's simply because they can't deal with the amount of calls they are getting so they've plucked a date out of thin air so they only have to deal with customers travelling before that right now.

My birthday is May 15th, perhaps they are planning to reopen for me. I mean, I have no money to book anything or any way to travel there, but still. In reality not sure, it's probably just an arbitrary date where travel places will reassess?

It's just to prevent people who are travelling in June/July/August phoning up for refunds. They'll extend that date nearer the time.

The government has to review the lockdown measures periodically and that’s the longest amount of time they can be renewed to tomorrow (which is the deadline for the review from the last measures).

SAGE met earlier this week to discuss and decide on the advice that they will give to govt and govt will have considered the advice now ready to make a decision on an extension tomorrow. They may choose to relax some parts (unlikely) or they may just give more information on the impact of existing measures.

We were supposed to be travelling to Center Parcs at the beginning of next month and received our email today about the park being closed until 14th May.

I think PP is correct. Rather than announcing the holidays will be cancelled for the next few months and having an influx of a huge amount of customers trying to get refunds etc, they are dealing with it in more manageable chunks. Center Parcs announced a couple of weeks ago that they would be closed until the end of April. I’d imagine they have caught up with issuing most the refunds and date changes for that period and thus can now deal with the customers for the first 2 weeks of May.

Butlins is until 14th May too I believe. I agree with PP that its only until then for now so they only have to deal with those that have booked up until then. If they confirmed too far then there would be a lot more people to deal with.

It’s important to remember that these holiday companies will have skeleton staff at the moment and so they just don’t have the man power to be able to deal with a huge influx of customers in one fell swoop.