Coronavirus and our business
Cancelling your Cotswold holiday with us
I wanted to do a blog today, Tuesday 17th March 2020. 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 unrivalled knowledge of the Cotswold region 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 28% profit which makes up our company wages and income. This is after we have paid all the accommodation, transfers, advertising and office costs. People are sometimes surprised at this small figure but we get no discount from accommodation providers. If a hotel room costs you £100, it costs us £100 also. There is a good reason and I’m happy to explain further if anyone wants to email us.
So, if we returned people’s deposits, for whatever reason, we would have done our work and received no income. Our company, before long, would be out of business. 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 https://www.cotswoldwalkingco.com/cotswold-walking-holiday-booking/
You can see 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 aversely 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, providing no costs have occurred, for them at a convenient future date. We hope this helps our guests to not lose out financially and still enjoy a great Cotswold hiking Holiday.
Best Wishes, Ashley Hayes
