I had a holiday booked for one week in a hotel in Morocco. Seven days before the flight I got COVID. So I could not travel and isolate for ten days. I asked the hotel to move the date, but they refused. I am now looking into starting a dispute with Monzo once the 14 days have passed since I contacted the seller.
Here my case. When I booked the holiday, it was a package through a special offer email the hotel sent. That email had no Terms and Conditions and no policy. Just the offer, then a link to pay the holiday in advance on a huge discount. But if you book through their official website, you are offered a £30 cancellation fee in case of not being able to travel. Also, before booking, you have to accept their Terms and Conditions. There you can see that on their T&S they don’t accept refund or change of dates. But I never accepted that or saw that because I booked through another platform, not their website.
Do I have a case here? I feel lied on because I was never shown their Terms and Conditions and I never accepted them. I understand I maybe should have gone to their website before booking through that email link they sent. But I never accepted them on that link offer they sent out to existing costumers.
Am I being entitled or do I have some consumer rights here?
Does Monzo have any chance at disputing this succesfully? Thanks!
With that of of the way, I think it’s unlikely you’ll get a successful chargeback out of this. The merchant will likely point Monzo to their T&Cs and say you agreed to them by booking (you say you got a promotional email and booked through that, but don’t say if you clicked a link to a payment page or phoned them up).
If you booked following a link from the email and if that link is still live and you can visit it again to take screenshots showing you weren’t advised of a no-cancellation policy, maybe you have something you could try - but I wouldn’t rate your chances of success.
Otherwise, you should be looking to claim on your travel insurance rather than attempting a chargeback.
Bit of a tough one really, do you not have, or did you not take out travel insurance, from booking the holiday?
I’m not 100% but a chargeback/dispute is generally for goods etc not received, or damaged and so on.
The holiday was still available for you to go, albeit you couldn’t because you’re now ill.
As mentioned above, you’d need to give sufficient evidence to say it was able to be cancelled pre booking and as part of the terms and conditions which should have been available to you at time of booking either in small print or some attached document elsewhere.
You’d also need the full conversation transcript to provide to Monzo for their justification of not cancelling it for you.
Thanks for your reply.
Yeah I have screenshoots and the links are still up. So here a comparison between booking through their website vs booking through their promotional link on the email. That link had no T&C’s anywhere.
(The terms you see at the bottom of the “Powered by Stripe” are just for the Stripe company.)
Unfortunately not. Chargebacks work on the idea of the company not giving you what you paid for. So for example, if you booked with a “cancel for free if you get covid” policy (which some airlines have done on and off) and then they failed to honour that, you’d have a good case.
But in this case, there’s not a lot you can do. Some travel insurance wouldn’t even cover this scenario, so don’t beat yourself up over not having insurance.
The best advice I can give for the future is look for hotels on booking.com or Airbnb that allow free cancellation up to the day before the booking starts.
Travel during covid is a minefield, I’m sorry you got caught out this time.
It looks like this isn’t a U.K. company, so ATOL protection wouldn’t apply here. Not accepting any terms and conditions is really worse for you than them. You can generally charge back if you can show terms and conditions were broken - as you don’t have any, you can’t do that.
Still, can’t hurt to talk it through with the disputes team with Monzo and see if there’s anything they can do. They know the answer better than anyone here and I’m sure if they can help they will.
