What To Do When Your Flight Gets Cancelled

So, the worst thing has happened and your flight has been cancelled. Your relaxed, zen-like holiday state is now a distant memory, replaced instead with a whole maelstrom of stress and anxiety. I’ve been there. Twice actually. It’s not fun, but trust me you are going to get home, it’s not the end of the world.

Having a flight cancelled when you’re already away is the worst, there’s no doubt. No one wants to spend their holiday days trying to find decent enough WiFi to email your airline or ticket provider to see what alternatives are available. 

My flight cancellation experiences

The first time I had a flight cancelled I was already at the airport (Paris CDG) with a friend. We’d gone for a quick city break to watch some tennis and we were both due back in work in the morning. The flight had already been pushed back a few times and eventually got cancelled which led to the world’s biggest queue of tired, annoyed people at the airline desk. 

By the time we eventually got to the front of the queue, the next available flight with that particular airline was four days later, which didn’t work for either of us. Obviously with everyone else looking for alternatives, both the Eurostar and Skyscanner were getting expensive really quickly. After a quick call to my dad back home, we booked a replacement flight to a tiny airport in Doncaster that we didn’t know existed for the next morning. For perspective, that’s about two and a half hours away from where we were supposed to land and public transport isn’t great from that area. 

The cancelled flight was refunded almost immediately which was great and the airline put us up in hotels overnight. The trouble was those hotels were in EuroDisney an hour away and it was already 2am. So, trying to get back to the airport in the morning in Paris rush hour traffic was not cheap. Make sure you get receipts for any travel or extra costs you’ve incurred due to the cancellation. That’s taxis, food, hotel stays, differences in replacement flight costs – all of it. For this particular low-cost airline, it ended up taking 5 months and a lot of repeatedly chasing customer services to get my money back. Don’t give up, eventually it is worth it.

The second time was in Sri Lanka where WiFi was spotty at best and the airline went under so all international flights were cancelled and there were no alternatives that they could offer. Luckily, I’d booked through Student Universe so they were really helpful. However, they could only take payment over the phone and my call package wasn’t valid in Sri Lanka, so nothing was getting through. So, it’s always best to allow outgoing roaming on your phone before you leave just in case of emergencies. I’d leave incoming off because otherwise you end up paying for all those spam calls and calls from people who forget you’re away. I’d also recommend getting an e-SIM from Airalo to stay connected on a budget while you’re on holiday.

Again, I’d chosen the specific flight because I was at work the next day (I don’t learn), and I’d booked a bus back up from the airport already. This led to a new flight with an 11-hour layover in Riyadh airport and leaving the night before because of the Sri Lankan curfew that was in place. Don’t know if you’re familiar with Riyadh airport but there’s pretty much nothing to do there. At all. 

Since the airline went bust, I got the original ticket price back but there was no chance of getting the flight difference back – I tried but no success there. 

So final tips:

• Get a credit card and ring them before you leave to say you’re going out of the country. If you need to buy a plane ticket, that’s a big purchase and you don’t want it getting flagged for potential fraud.
• Make sure you either book directly with the airline or with a trusted ABTA/ATOL agent. Third-party sites are not that helpful when it comes to rebooking flights and at least if you’re buying through the airline, they’re going to offer you alternatives or refunds quicker.
• Don’t panic. Flights get cancelled all the time so the agents and people at the airline desks know what the process is, even if you have to stay an extra day in an airport hotel or hostel, you are going to get home one way or another. 
• Get travel insurance. Although I didn’t use my insurance in either instance here, travel insurance can help speed up the compensation process and help with logistics if things are out of the airline’s hands.