Last Friday’s power outage in Heathrow Airport disrupted vacations across the worldcapoeira777, causing countless thousands of travelers to miss prepaid reservations and forgo long-anticipated adventures.
Among them were Sheila Addison, a therapist from Seattle, who missed out on a four-day whisky-tasting in the Scottish Highlands, forfeiting a $500 nonrefundable hotel room and a rare break from her work routine; Zachary Wang and friends from Brown University, who lost $260 in “Les Misérables” tickets, $180 from an Airbnb reservation and two days of spring break in London; and Steve Wehr of Hyde Park, N.Y., who missed two days in Jordan — including the first day of a cruise — a loss of about $1,500.
Who pays when your vacation gets ruined through no fault of your own?
The answer, all too often, is you. Though travelers can recoup some losses through refunded flights and vouchers for meals and hotel stays, airlines generally do not pick up the tab for reservations that can’t be canceled, expensive last-minute flights that must be booked, or missed family events like weddings.
Unfortunately,66br there is no perfect way to protect yourself, but there are three imperfect ones. Here’s what you can do:
Many shipments have been diverted to West Coast ports, where dockworkers belong to a different union that agreed a new contract last year. The ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles say they are handling at least as many containers as they did during the pandemic shipping boom of 2021-22.
His battle station will be Seat 9 in Row 4 of Section 201 at Madison Square Garden.
Find the right travel insuranceMr. Wehr does not expect to recover that $1,500 he lost by missing two days in Jordan. “We didn’t have trip insurance,” he lamented in an email.
It probably wouldn’t have mattered. Travel insurance is generally a “covered peril” type of policy, meaning that the fine print has a list of events that you are covered for, like illness, hijacking and natural disasters. Guess what is almost never on there: airport power outages.
“It covers a lot. It doesn’t cover everything,” said Stan Sandberg, a co-founder of TravelInsurance.com, an online marketplace. Companies try to update policies to match the current travel environment, he said, but only one he knew of covered what happened at Heathrow.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
anonovo-pg1Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.capoeira777