Cancellation Experience
Today’s blog post is all about our experience in cancelling our trip to Walt Disney World. Hopefully our experience will make yours easier. Now remember ours was cancelled due to Hurricane Irma, therefore a lot of other people were in the same boat. Which will be helpful if you find yourself in the same situation some day. If you have to cancel due to personal issues things may not run as smoothly. The first thing we did before picking up the phone to call anyone is look at our travel insurance policy. We have one with our credit card. It said any cancellation fee would be covered. This put our minds a bit more at ease before we made that first phone call.
Flights
Our flights were cancelled. We were supposed to fly into Orlando on Monday, September 11th. The Orlando airport was not open that day and our flight ceased to exist. This made it very easy on our end to get a refund for dollars spent on our flights. I was very impressed with how great these customer service reps were. They gave us a full refund without doing any sort of sales pitch. We had booked our flights through a third party but that didn’t even get called into question. They simply said that we should see our money refunded within 7 – 10 business days. Our money was put back on our credit card within 24 hours. Our flights were with DeltaAir through WestJet. All in all we were very impressed with the agents we dealt with, how quickly we got through on the phone, and their reaction to our cancellation. When you need to cancel a flight you do need to use the phone, making your experience very dependent on the person on the other line. We were very happy with the individual we dealt with and would deal with her again if need be.
Room Reservations
We cancelled our resort reservations the day before we were supposed to arrive. Due to the storm the DVC call centre was closed so we were put directly through to resort reservations. I could have just cancelled them online on the DVC website but because it was so close to our reservation I wanted to be sure no one was expecting us. The gal we dealt with did say that everything connected to our reservation would be cancelled. Now because we are DVC members our park tickets and halloween tickets were not connected to our room reservations so we had to cancel these separately. Our dining plan was connected with the resort reservation. We have yet to see the refund on this amount. So we cancelled on Sunday and today is now Wednesday. We were told it would take 7-10 business days to see our funds returned. Considering how many people must have been trying to make cancellations and adjustments we did not have to wait on the phone for more than 10 minutes which surprised me.
Park Tickets
We expected some push back on cancelling our tickets because they have no expiration date. We wanted to cancel them because we only have a 2 day park pass. We had planned to do an evening at the Animal Kingdom during the DVC party and an evening at Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party. Now we plan to return in January when no alternate evenings will be available so we’ll want more day passes. When you purchase more days you get a discounted rate so we wanted to be able to start from scratch. We were unable to cancel our tickets through DVC, which was frustrating because you can purchase tickets through DVC. They transferred us to ticket reservations, after having waited an hour and a half to speak to someone at DVC. We were put on hold for another thirty minutes. The cast member then cancelled our park tickets and our halloween tickets. If we would have waited a few more days before calling I feel confident the lines wouldn’t have been so busy, but I wanted to have everything done. I didn’t want to have to think about it anymore.
DVC Points
Now because there’s very little availability for DVC in the coming months we will return to Disney in January. We had already talked about returning in April but of course we won’t be going back in April after being their in January. I had already booked a resort in April to secure our rooms so we needed to cancel that reservation as well as our current vacation. The cast member said that it will take a few days to see our points resolve themselves as they have to do everything manually. Normally when you make a cancellation within 30 days your points will be put into a holding account. Which means they will expire if you do not use them within the use year. Honestly, looking at our vacation points at this moment I find it overwhelming trying to ensure that we’ve received that amount of points back we’re supposed to have. Hopefully in a few days I can look at it and it will make a little bit more sense.
Overall, I am extremely impressed with all the people we have dealt with. It seems everyone is understanding, us as well as them. We feel terrible talking to these people who have their worlds turned upside down, with families dealing with property damage and surviving with no power. They sympathize that we can’t go on a vacation we’ve been looking forward to and that we can’t go down any time soon. What a reminder that you shouldn’t choose to not book a holiday because something may happen. Friends, if you vacation enough something is bound to happen. And look, everything turned out alright. We’re getting the money back we’ve already spent, we went on a little mini vacation and we’ll return to Disney at another time. You’ve got live your life not worrying about the what-if’s. If you did you’d never do anything. Now it’s time to buckle down and plan another vacation. Wish us luck!
