i have a skiing trip booked March 28th to April 4th with Neilson using Thomas Cook airline Manchester to Turin. Received a message to phone local Thomas Cook Friday when they told the Manchester and Birmingham flights were cancelled and i had seats on the Gatwick one if i wished, or i could cancel and get a full refund.
I paid less tahn £900 for my holiday which is a bargain for a ski from the door holiday in school holidays, so after a few looks on the internet i could not find anything similar for less than £500 extra, it seemed accept the Gatwick flight was the only option. Will be a first flight from Gatwick for me as living in the Lake district, its not our first or even 4th choice of departure airport.
what seems starnge is flights can get cancelled because of lack of demand etc, but for the past 3 months if i put my trip into the Neilson website, it came up with no availabilty, leaving me to assume the flight was full? perhaps this was not the case and i have only received notification, 2 days before what would have 6 months before the trip?
By: rdc1000 - 28th September 2009 at 11:43
Have you thought about going LGW-Newcastle instead with Flybe, it means that you’ll have to do the metro journey to Newcastle city centre, but may be cheaper if there are a few of you.
By: cockerhoop - 28th September 2009 at 11:36
going to take train on way down on the day before, and stop over as we had originally budgetted for that as the flight is 6AM
but coming back its Easter Sunday, so planning to fly Gatwick-Manchester in the afternoon and the train from there.
By: rdc1000 - 28th September 2009 at 10:24
There are a variety of reasons why the flight could have been cancelled. Neilson would only have committed to a selected number of seats on the flight, and even if they had the option to purchase more as bookins increased, they may have had bottlenecks elsewhere in the system, i.e. no more hotel rooms/chalet beds available at the time you were searching for.
Overall the flight may not have been selling well through other operators, although I suspect it may have been culled as part of wider changes at the charter operators, and as part of a reduction in seat capacity. It is likely that there will be another Manchester flight on the same day, and some passengers may have been consolidated onto that, with others, like yourself, being forced to accept LGW. Given that there is 6 months of sales left then I would suggest it is the wider changes in the market that have led to this, as they would have taken a chance to sell seats otherwise.
Getting to LGW from Cumbria is a pain. I grew up in the Eden valley, and going on the German exchange was a pain as we had to fly DeutscheBA from LGW. I suggest you buy a family rail card and book rail tickets three months out.
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September 28, 2009 at 10:15 am