What happens if your flight is cancelled?

[PriamFarrl]

I’m due to fly early next week and I keep hearing about flights being cancelled.
What happens if your flight is cancelled? I’ve booked through Lastminute so I’m covered to a degree but the place we are going only has one or two flights a day and they are all fully booked.
I doubt we would be able to get on a later flight.

So if our flight was cancelled what could we do?

You are normally offered the chance to rebook an alternative flight, or offered a refund/vouchers if you can't get one or it's you no longer can travel.

BTW You can insist on a cash refund rather than the vouchers which is what they try to push you to take initially.

Other associated costs will depend on how you have booked them, if it's part of a package, etc.

We got a flight home cancelled by Easyjet three years ago, a few days before we were due to fly and it was a ‘mare. Told we could rebook online but there weren’t alternative flights with seats. Eventually found a totally different routing and had to get a hire car to it and an extra hotel night. I think that was eventually reimbursed after lots of wrangling but then had to get a very expensive taxi home from wrong airport in the uk and they def did not pay for that

It was out of their control that time though (French air traffic control strikes).

If you’ve booked as part of a package there should be more options available

It all depends how late they cancel. See EU261 regulations. Generally if on the day, they need to rebook you or offer a refund. You may also be able to claim compensation depending on how delayed you are getting to your destination.

Airlines are having to cancel flights at the moment due to covid impacting on staff so you would hope these are being assessed proactively with focus on merging part full flights or high frequency routes and should be done in advance. If there are issues like weather or unplanned systems outages then they can be on the day.

Our flights for later in April were cancelled last week. We couldn't get onto the next day's flights as it was full (and our dates were fixed) so we cancelled, got a refund, and moved destination. It was a stressy 24 hours but we're still getting our break.

While frustrating and annoying, I'd much rather they cancel in advance rather than last minute, or - even worse - cancelling your return when you're already away! If your flight for next week hasn't been cancelled yet then I think hyou'll hopefully be ok.

Thank you all.
It sounds a lot more optimistic.

I’ve also read today that out of the 115 flights cancelled on Monday only 5 were last minute.
I had visions of us sitting in departures and seeing CANCELLED come up on the screen.