Cancellation? too few people?

[Smuggs]

I called ABD today to see how the May 28th Southwest Splendor was filling up. (I have not booked yet) They said they are at 15%. With my limited math skills that tells me they have approx. 6 people on the trip, and if i book it goes to 20%

What amount do they need to have to make a trip a "go"? I cannot do any of the other SWS dates due to other commitments.

I searched and saw one year they cancelled a ton of trips. Did they give you other ABD options? Did you have to pay the differences?

 

[sayhello]

I called ABD today to see how the May 28th Southwest Splendor was filling up. (I have not booked yet) They said they are at 15%. With my limited math skills that tells me they have approx. 6 people on the trip, and if i book it goes to 20%

What amount do they need to have to make a trip a "go"? I cannot do any of the other SWS dates due to other commitments.

I searched and saw one year they cancelled a ton of trips. Did they give you other ABD options? Did you have to pay the differences?

I went on SWS in May of 2008 with 14 people. So you don't have to have a *ton* of people for it to be a go. But as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a hard & fast cutoff for "too few". I know others have had trips go (including SWS) with numbers in the teens.

They did do a lot of cancellations in 2009, but from what we can tell, it was fairly isolated to that year, because they had just expanded a great deal, when suddenly the economy tanked. They ended up consolidating a lot of trips.

If they do cancel your trip due to too few people, first off, they won't do it less than 70 days prior to its scheduled start date. That's 2011's policy at any rate. If they do cancel it, they will really work with you to get something set up for you. In 2009, I'd signed up for the Canadian Rockies trip, and it was cancelled (they said there were 3 of us signed up). I was signed up for an Adults Only trip in September. That was really the only timeframe that was good for me, and I really wanted to do an Adults Only. It turned out there was an Adults Only Alaska trip scheduled to leave just a couple of days earlier. So they switched me to the Alaska trip, at no extra charge. PLUS, they paid the fees & extra cost to re-do my airline ticket to go to Alaska, even though I hadn't booked the airfare through them. I really felt like they bent over backwards to get me on a trip that I'd enjoy, with as little impact as possible. About the only thing I heard that they didn't do that year, was someone had a trip, it might have been Costa Rica, and ended up being switched to Italy. ABD wouldn't pay the difference in cost between tickets to Costa Rica & Italy. But that's about it. I know some people were very unhappy that year, but I felt ABD really treated me outstandingly, considering.

Sayhello

 

[Bobo912]

The Australia trip we booked in 2009 was cancelled and I was happy with the way ABD handled it. They cancelled the trip very early and I hadn't booked airfare yet, so there wasn't a whole lot to rearrange. I might have been more upset if they had cancelled nearer our departure date. I don't have any personal experience with ABD covering the price difference, since we switched to Alaska, which was a lower priced trip, so they just applied the deposit we had already paid to the new reservation. There were so many trips that I would have been happy to take, I guess I wasn't as disappointed as some people were about the cancellations. I felt that the senior reps who handled the cancellations did a very good job and I sent an email to ABD to compliment the two who worked with me. Also, when we got to our hotel in Fairbanks there was a gift basket in our room to thank us for changing our plans. It was a nice touch.