Canceling a reserved vacation package: what we ask, and what the supplier decides

Read this before you reserve rather than after. Two situations sit on this page and they behave nothing alike: a request that has not been confirmed, which you can drop at any point without telling anybody, and a confirmed reservation, where the money and the room are with the supplier and their written terms govern what follows.

The line that divides this whole page

Almost every question we get about canceling a reserved vacation package turns out to be a question about something that is not reserved at all. So the line has to come first. Sending the form is a request. A request holds nothing, reserves nothing and costs nothing: no room is set aside for you, no seat is held, no card is asked for and none is stored. If you change your mind at that stage, there is nothing to cancel and nobody to tell. You can simply stop replying, and the matter ends there.

A reservation begins later, and it begins in writing. We put a specific proposal to you: the dates, the property type and level, what is included, the starting price per person, and the supplier's own cancellation terms. You read it. If you say yes, we place the reservation and the supplier confirms it. From that moment there is something real to cancel, and from that same moment it belongs to the supplier rather than to us.

We charge nothing to cancel, at any stage

Take this plainly, because offices differ and you are right to ask. We do not charge an administration fee. There is no service charge, no processing fee, no handling fee and no minimum. Not on the day you reserve, not on the day you cancel, not at any point between the two. This is not an introductory arrangement and it is not conditional on anything you do.

The reason is arithmetic rather than generosity. A supplier pays us a commission once a reservation is confirmed. If the reservation falls away, that commission usually falls away with it, and we would rather tell you where our incentive sits than pretend there is none in the room. It also means we have no fee to give back, because we never took one.

Nothing on this website takes a payment. There is no checkout, no card field and no card kept on file, and the site could not accept money if you wanted it to. Money changes hands with the supplier, later, under the terms you were shown first. So there is nothing here for us to refund.

What we actually do on the day you tell us

Tell us in whatever way is easiest: reply to the written confirmation, use the form on this site, or telephone +1 (816) 414-3106. Written instructions reach Etre Super Travel Reservations LLC at 6317 N Antioch Rd, Suite 108, Gladstone, MO 64119. One line is enough. Put it in writing if you can, because a written instruction is the thing we can act on without asking you to repeat yourself, and it fixes the date.

Three things then happen. The instruction is dated and recorded here. It goes to the supplier in writing the same working day, with your reservation reference and your reason if you gave one. What comes back is passed to you in writing exactly as the supplier put it, including the parts you will not like. The form itself is open at any hour; a person reads it and answers within one working day.

We put your case rather than simply forwarding it. If there is a reason worth stating, illness in the party, a change on the supplier's side, a reservation made days rather than months ago, we state it and we ask. What we will not do is speak as though we had authority we do not have. A supplier's terms are not ours to overrule, and money we have never held is not ours to release. Any office that tells you otherwise is describing a power it does not own. Sometimes the asking works. Often it does not, and you hear that from us in the same words the supplier used.

Supplier terms vary more than people expect

There is no single schedule here and we are not going to invent one. Terms are set by whoever holds the room, and they differ by country, by property, by season and sometimes by the individual week. Some reservations are refundable in full up to a day named in the terms, and not a day after it. Others hold a deposit and return the rest. A few are non-refundable from the moment they are confirmed, which is usual where the supplier is small, the season is short or the space is scarce.

The terms that apply to you are set out in the written confirmation, before anything is paid. Read them at that point. That is the moment they are still a choice: you can say no, or ask us to look at another week in the catalog that is held on softer conditions. Once you have said yes, the terms are the deal, and reading them afterwards changes nothing.

Changes follow the same logic. Moving dates, adding a person, dropping one: none of these are ours to grant. We ask in writing, the same working day, and we come back with the answer. A change is sometimes cheaper than a cancellation and sometimes dearer, and occasionally a supplier treats it as a cancellation followed by a new reservation at the current price. We find that out rather than guess at it.

If the supplier is the one who cancels

It happens. A property closes, a small operator cannot run a week for two people, weather shuts a road for a season. When the supplier cancels, we hear it and you hear it from us the same working day, and you are not left to chase a company you have never spoken to.

What follows depends on the supplier again, but it is usually one of three things: the same week on other dates, a comparable week elsewhere at the same level, or the money back. Those go to you with the figures attached and no push toward any of them. If the supplier is slow to answer, we keep asking, and we tell you each time we have asked, so you are not sitting in silence wondering whether anything is moving.

One subject we will not touch, in either direction, is insurance. This office does not sell it, does not arrange it, takes no commission on it and will not advise you on what cover to buy or whether to buy any at all. That is a permanent refusal rather than a gap we mean to fill one day. It is a regulated business and we are not in it. Where you take that question is your own decision, and we would rather say nothing than say something wrong about a contract that is not ours.