What is your deposit and cancellation policy?
| Title: | What is your deposit and cancellation policy? | |||||||
| Category: | Pre-Booking Questions | |||||||
| Author: | Daniele Pintaudi | Updated: | Jan 30, 2019 | Views: | 9,560 | |||
| Tags: | cancellation policy deposit travel insurance | |||||||
Unless otherwise specified on a special itinerary, following it our deposit and cancellation policy:
Deposit and Balance:
If the vacation is more than 90 days from the date of booking:
- Deposit: 20% of vacation total is due when you book.
- Balance: The remaining 80% is due 90 days before the start date of the trip.
If the vacation will begin in 90 days or less:
- The full balance is due with booking
Holding Space:
While we understand that there are often many things to coordinate, we cannot hold space on any of our trips without a firm deposit.
Cancellation Policy:
- Deposits are refundable within 50 days of booking, so long as they are made more than 180 days before the start date of the tour.
- After 50 days, deposits are no longer refundable. However, if you find someone to take your space, your deposit may be applied to them.
- All further scheduled payments are non-refundable once they are made. If we sell out the tour (including reserve spaces not shown on the website) we can move your full payment to another tour within 12 months.
These cancellation terms reflect times that we must pay out expenses for your trip on your behalf. At times that we no longer offer refunds, we have already paid out the associated costs, and refunds are not available to us. Because of this, we are unable to bend these terms.
Please obtain travel insurance as soon as you book your reservation.
We strongly suggest you obtain "Cancel for Any Reason" insurance if you are not in a position to gamble your full payment made to us. If you need, we are always happy to help with this.
Please click here if you are not convinced you should get travel insurance.
We work closely with MH Ross for Travel Insurance. Click here to see if an MH Ross travel insurance policy meets your needs. We strongly urge guests to obtain "Cancel for Any Reason" insurance, as this covers several unforeseen events that may not be covered by other policies, including our own cancellation policy.
Other Travel Insurance providers include Allianz, Travel Guard, and John Hancock. Feel free to shop around, but please know that we only have a direct relationship with MH Ross, which can make handling claims easier.
Please Get Travel Insurance
Every year we see people forced to cancel because of unforeseen events. Illness in the family, natural disasters, and all sorts of other things can and do get in the way of travel plans. Every so often, this happens to one of our guests that decided not to spend the money on travel insurance. Sometimes when this happens, they ask us to make an exception with regard to our policy. This puts us in a very uncomfortable position. Our cancellation policy is not about making money on people that don't come. It is merely about covering costs we have already paid out on your behalf.
Our vacations are not like a product that one can simply take a return on, then put back on a shelf, and Italy is very much a "pay in advance" society. Once you have made a deposit with us, we pay the a deposit to our suppliers on your behalf. This is not refundable to us.
90 days before your vacation begins, we pay out the vast majority of our expenses on your behalf, and if you do not come for any reason, we cannot get that back. So to put it simply, if a couple were to cancel 89 days before the trip, a full refund by us would not only cause us to lose the value of two people on the trip, but also all of our expenses for those two people, as well as the relative costs for our fixed expenses, and we are a small mom and pop company. In other words, we would lose much more than what you actually paid us because we would be refunding money to you that we cannot get refunded to us.
Taking all of this in consideration, we strongly urge all of our guests to obtain travel insurance so that this kind of issue is protected for all involved.