Full story below, but the question for the group is: am I f*cked? Or do you have any suggestions for how to handle this situation?
My wife and I were scheduled to fly to St. Lucia on Thursday, Dec. 26 for a 5-night stay. Our flight was cancelled, with no advance warning (literally, the sign at the gate changed from “on time” to “cancelled” mere minutes before we were scheduled to board), and we were informed that we wouldn’t be able to get from Miami to St. Lucia until Monday the 30th, or perhaps through Philadelphia on Saturday the 28th at the earliest. For obvious reasons, we called the resort as soon as we found this out and cancelled our trip.
Because we cancelled on our arrival day, the resort is telling us that the cancellation fee is 100% – in other words, we are being asked to forfeit the entire cost of our trip, which was paid up front.
In case you didn’t know (and most people in the States don’t), severe storms hit St. Lucia on Dec. 24-25, causing extreme damage that exceeded the last several tropical storms/hurricanes that hit the island. The airport was flooded, two bridges were wiped out, roads were impassable, significant portions of the island were without power and/or water, several deaths, etc. Online, there was some confusion about the extent of the damage, especially at the resorts. However, what is clear is that, although apparently SLAPSA (St. Lucia gov’t) said the airport reopened on the 26th, flights were being cancelled as late as the evening of the 27th, and probably into the weekend. (And, as I said, our airline was not going to be able to get us in until the 28th or 30th.) So, at best, we MAY have been able to arrive and spend three nights on St. Lucia, and salvage whatever vacation we could, dependent on the availability of the facilities and activities we were hoping to utilize.
Clearly, we feel for the people of St. Lucia affected by the storms. That said, though, there appears to have been a concerted effort on the part of the government and locals in the tourism industry to act as if nothing was wrong and that people should have attempted to get to the island however possible, which I strongly believe was a dangerous (if well-intentioned) position for them to take.
I should note that if anyone – the resort, our airline – had given us a heads-up about the damage the day before we traveled, this could have been mitigated, but we had no knowledge that anything was wrong until our flight was cancelled and we immediately called the resort.
Thanks in advance for any views you can share. Before you ask: no, we didn’t have travel insurance. ![[oops.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1f129ddad071ffe5db6c99817c3cab666035a70a.gif "oops"){kind=small}