Travelling with kids is an adventure on a whole new level, with many fun but also unexpected interruptions along the way. Sometimes the disruptions start even before the holiday commences.
Has your child gotten ill the day before the family was due to go on a holiday? You are not alone. Millions of families lose money on their unused travel bookings every year. The fact that you have to cancel a long-awaited break is awful on its own, but it gets even worse if your reservations are non-refundable and you have to lose all the money you paid for the holiday. Considering that it is not just you travelling, but the whole family, these cancelled holidays can eat away a big part of the family budget.
Luckily, a new service has arrived to give mums a chance to recover a large part of the cancelled holiday funds. SpareFare.net allows travellers to resell their non-refundable flights and hotel bookings to other people looking for travel bargains. The idea is simple. If a traveller cannot go on a trip—due to an illness or other issue—SpareFare connects them to another traveller who is going to the same place at the same time. The sellers can recoup some of the money they paid for the trips, while buyers get a true discount of up to 50-60% by not paying the current price of the bookings.
If you manage to sell the family holiday, you probably won’t recover 100% of what you paid, but even getting half of your money back is better than losing everything! And you can use that money for the next family trip!
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you cannot go on your holiday, it is important to know which travel reservations are transferable, and which are not.
Flight tickets are the trickiest. You can transfer your flight to someone else if your airline allows you to change the name associated with the flight. There is always a fee for the name change and they vary from airline to airline. The airlines which offer this service are mainly European, low-cost airlines. SpareFare has prepared a comprehensive list of airlines which allow name changes, including a summary of their fees and rules. If you cannot see your airline on the list, this means that it does not allow name changes.
Hotel bookings are much easier to resell. If the reservation is made through a booking engine, the name change is done through the traveller’s online account. If the booking is made directly with the hotel, a phone call to reception is all it takes. Hotels do not charge fees to change the name on a reservation, so you can recover a lot more of what you paid for a hotel reservation.
Galena Stavreva is the CEO of SpareFare.net – a secure secondary marketplace for flights, hotel rooms and package holidays. Travel is great, and SpareFare’s marketplace is all about turning the less fun parts of it – such as cancellations – into new deals that improve the status quo for everyone.
