Travel Question: Can we cancel and rebook holiday because of illness?

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Ill-health needn’t put a permanent dampner on your travel plans (Getty)

Q Can I change my holiday to another date due to one of the party been taken ill with heart problems? We booked the holiday to travel in June but within a couple of weeks of the booking this has happened. The travel company says we can’t but need your advice please?

Linda M

A I am sorry to hear about the illness. In these unfortunate circumstances, if you are unable to travel as originally booked and need to change the dates, there are usually three possible options which may help.

The first, which you have clearly discussed, is to ask the travel firm to allow you to shift the departure date. In some cases this can be done for a nominal fee (plus any increase in the holiday price on the new date). Evidently the answer in your case was “no”.

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I trust the travel company then offered option two, which is that someone takes the place of the poorly person on the original holiday. This can be done on a standard package holiday for a fee of about £50. Indeed, if none of you are willing or able to travel on the original dates, then the whole holiday can be transferred to other people under the terms of the Package Holiday Regulations.

The third option, which may be the most straightforward, is to claim on travel insurance; normally the unexpected illness of a travelling companion is grounds for cancellation with a full refund. You can then book another holiday on the optimum dates. But if you choose this route, a word of advice: June is off-peak, and travel firms struggle to sell all their capacity. So in your position I would not begin looking until halfway through May, and perhaps not until the start of June. There will be plenty of capacity; prices are unlikely to increase significantly, and may well fall; and you have minimum exposure to the risk that you will not be able to take the holiday for some non-insurable reason.

Every day, our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder