Coronavirus and Lycian Way Holidays: Cancelling your holiday with us
Here is our blog on Wednesday 18th March 2020 regarding coronavirus and Lycian Way Holidays. It will provide some explanation about our business and our new cancellation policy since the outbreak of COVID–19. I will cover a little bit about how our small business works, the effect of the virus and our new cancellation policy.
I think the first thing to say is that we are facing unprecedented times for our industry and an uncertain future ahead. I don’t want to be negative in this blog as it is important to try and remain positive and look at the future opportunities but we do have to be realistic.
Firstly, let’s talk about how we operate and what happens when you make a booking:
When you book a holiday with us you are choosing a local company with experience of The Lycian Way and the available accommodation. We ask for a 40% deposit of the cost of your holiday. When we receive this money we start arranging your itinerary and book up accommodation. For every sale, we expect to make an average 37% profit which makes up our company’s wages and income. This is after we have paid all the accommodation, transfers, advertising & office costs. If we returned people’s deposits, for whatever reason, we would have done our work and received no income. We therefore recommend all guests have holiday insurance to claim refunds if they cannot make their holiday. This has worked well for the 10+ years that we have been arranging holidays. Our booking terms are posted on the menu bar of our website. Here is the link http://localhost/lycian4/make-a-booking/
You can see that we keep our ‘terms and conditions’ as simple as possible & don’t use any small print. Now, as I write this it seems very likely that many holiday insurance companies are not going to cover people that have been adversely affected by coronavirus. So, with this in mind:
We will allow any guests who have booked with us to rearrange their holidays within the next 18 months without losing their deposit.
In other words, we will cancel their current holiday & arrange a new itinerary, free of charge, as long as we have not incurred any costs, for them at a convenient future date. We hope this helps our guests to not lose out financially and still enjoy a great Lycian Way hiking Holiday.
Best Wishes,
Ashley Hayes