Cancellation requests for pre-booked holidays could spread like wildfires

Yesterday Jet2 and TUI announced that they had cancelled all flights to the Greek island of Rhodes and the Foreign Office has urged British travellers affected by the wildfires to follow guidance from Greek emergency services. 

Today Easyjet has announced that it has cancelled package holidays until Saturday 29 July 2023 and is contacting customers due to travel to the affected resorts up to and including 10 August "to discuss their options". 

Last week there was a race on for British holiday makers to cancel their holidays to Spain and Italy due to the heatwave sweeping across Europe.

For employees with pre-booked holiday what does this mean? Can an employee make a request to their employer to cancel their pre-booked holiday, or to move their holiday to another time in the future? 

Regulation 15(2)(b)not to take holiday on specified dates, by giving as many days' notice as the period of holiday to which the notice relates. However, within the legislation there is no similar provision that allows an employee to request to cancel or amend pre-booked holiday. This means that if an employee wishes to cancel their own holiday, employers do not have to agree to this request unless the entitlement to cancel holiday is set out in a policy or the employee’s contract of employment. An exception to this would be in the case of the employee being on sickness absence and not being able to take their holiday at that time, in which case the employee has the right to take their annual leave, that they are prevented from taking due to sickness, at a later date.

of the Worthing Time Regulations 1998 allows an employer to order a worker

Employers may have grounds to refuse a request for cancellation of holiday.  It may be that cancellations is not in the best interests for the business, or if cover for the employee’s holiday has already been arranged. It could be that the employee has a significant amount of accrued untaken holiday to use up. 

Ultimately it will be at the discretion of the employer as to whether they agree to the request or not. This could mean that those employees with planned trips to Rhodes who do request to cancel their holiday, if the request is refused, they will be having a staycation instead.