I booked my trip to Vietnam early, but it cost me more. How is that fair?

Simon Calder answers your questions on costly early bookings, Eurostar travel, and compensation for delays

A woman crosses the street in front of bikers in Ho Chi Minh City (Simon Calder)

Q I have booked an escorted tour to Vietnam in January 2026, for which I paid £5,795. The same holiday is now priced at £4,495. I queried the cost difference and was told that the lower price was only for new bookings. I feel that booking early has been to my detriment. Your advice please?

Sue B

A How infuriating to know that some of the people on your trip next year will have paid £1,300 less than you. But I am afraid that almost all travel companies reserve the right to reduce prices nearer to departure as well as to raise them.

There are good reasons for this. As you will appreciate, airline seats, hotel beds and ground arrangements such as tour buses are perishable items. If they are left empty, that represents a loss to the company. While all travel firms would love to give the best deal to the earliest bookers, and steadily increase prices up to the date of departure, sometimes that booking trend just doesn’t work out. The travel firm will have looked at the number of places it still has available just two or three months ahead, and decided that it needs to make a serious price cut to stimulate demand. In your case that is a discount of 22 per cent.

A few companies make it a policy to recompense early bookers if the price drops. Saga Cruises says: “You can book early with confidence that if we reduce the price of your cabin grade after you have booked, you will automatically receive the value of the difference.” But it is an expensive promise to keep.

At this point the main advice I have is: recognise that you were perfectly happy to book at £5,795, and don’t let this annoyance impinge on what is likely to be a brilliant holiday. January is the ideal month to visit Vietnam, with rainfall and tropical temperature at their lowest. On an escorted tour, each day will be filled with rewarding experiences.

My only other recommendation is: for meals that are not taken as part of the group, wander away from the hotel and find some excellent street food. Perhaps those who booked late may join you, and pick up the bill.

No Kent do: Eurostar trains no longer stop at either Ashford or Ebbsfleet (Getty/iStock)

Q I have just had a stressful journey to and from my home in Kent to Paris, flying from Gatwick to Charles de Gaulle. It was so much easier when Ebbsfleet and Ashford were stops on the Eurostar line from London to Paris. Can you see them reopening any time soon?

Martin I

A Not “soon” – but possibly in the next five years. One of the carrots dangled to the people of Kent in return for having their county carved up by High Speed One was the prospect of direct links to the Continent. And until 2020 some Eurostar trains from London to Paris and Brussels called at Ebbsfleet in northwest Kent and Ashford International in southeast Kent.

But only one in 25 Eurostar passengers used either Kent station; the remainder arrived or departed from London St Pancras International. The Kent stations were early fallers in the Covid pandemic, which did severe damage to Eurostar. While the cross-Channel passenger rail operator has been thriving for the past couple of years, Ebbsfleet and Ashford have remained mothballed.

Brexit plays a part: the decision to leave the EU and become subject to the entry-exit system has sharply increased the complexity and cost of operating a French border. The official line from Eurostar is: “Our Kent stations will remain closed throughout 2025 and will be reviewed in 2026. We understand that this may be frustrating, and we want to stress that we are closely monitoring the situation and, should there be any changes, we will provide an update.”

Eurostar’s chief executive, Gwendoline Cazenave, quoted in The Times recently, indicated Ebbsfleet and Ashford are nowhere close to the must-do list. “We are about city centre to city centre,” she said. Yet do not abandon hope just yet.

Gemini Trains, one of several contenders aiming to compete with Eurostar on the London-Paris route, plans to call at Ebbsfleet. The rail firm has the backing of Uber, which improves its prospects. The northwest Kent station is the obvious one to reopen first, because of the feed from southeast London and the M25. Were Gemini to win the beauty contest, it will start to create a whole new market for cross-Channel passenger trains – and that could also include reopening Ashford International.

There were long delays at Heathrow airport for our reader (AP)

Q I was held captive inside a broken plane on the apron at London Heathrow airport for five hours, for what should have been a one-hour flight. During that time we were served with one cup of water. There were no charging points for phones, so communications were difficult. I thought there were rules about how airlines had to handle such events?

Gerry O’S

A Ouch – sounds miserable. Air passengers’ rights rules address delays in some detail. In your case, they start with the case when the airline “reasonably expects a flight to be delayed beyond its scheduled time of departure for two hours or more”. This should trigger “meals and refreshments in a reasonable relation to the waiting time”. But the airline has two get-outs here.

First, note the phrase “reasonably expects”. I imagine the captain was confident that the problem could be fixed well before the two-hour point – were that not the case, then he or she would have offloaded passengers while the engineers got to work.

Next, the rules say: “Care for passengers awaiting … a delayed flight may be limited or declined if the provision of the care would itself cause further delay.” For a short flight such as yours, it is most unlikely the plane would carry suitable meals and refreshments to serve everyone once that two-hour wait ticked over. To provide such sustenance would have required everyone to disembark. I imagine the pilots – and the airline duty office – were hoping to get the problem solved and the plane on its way. The last thing they wanted was to set the passengers free and not be able to round them up for a speedy getaway.

After five hours, the airline was obliged to offer everyone on board the chance to walk away and get a full refund. If that did not happen, and you decided to abandon the journey, you should be able to claim a full refund (including for the return leg, if you bought a round-trip ticket).

What the airline cannot escape is a claim for £220 in compensation for the delayed arrival at your destination, given that the cause was a technical problem.

A delayed Kenya Airways flight from Mombasa to Nairobi left our reader in a fix (Getty Images)

Q I booked a holiday to Kenya, with flights from London Heathrow on British Airways to Nairobi and a connection to Mombasa, in both directions. At 6pm on our last evening, we were called by the travel agent to say that the internal flight the following day, from Mombasa to Nairobi had been moved later. We missed our connecting overnight flight and instead flew the following morning – arriving home 10 hours late. Are we entitled to compensation given that the long-haul flights were with BA?

Graham McC

A A booking like this, involving both British Airways and Kenya Airways, involves some tricky issues of consumer protection. Standard air passengers’ rights rules, to which I refer many times, depend on the nationality of the airline that is doing the flying. BA, as a UK carrier, is responsible for paying compensation for long delays in arrival for which it is liable. For example, before Covid and Ukraine I flew London-Moscow on a British Airways flight and missed the connection on a Russian airline to Volgograd. I was seven hours late at my final destination due to BA, and the airline duly paid compensation.

You are in the opposite situation. The airline that caused the problem was a non-UK (and non-EU) airline flying from outside Europe, and air passengers’ rights rules do not apply. It makes no difference that the Kenyan domestic hop had a BA flight number. This is known as a code-share; for the purposes of deciding whether or not compensation is payable, it is the airline doing the flying that counts.

Because you wisely booked a package holiday, you enjoy the protection of a different set of rules: the Package Travel Regulations. These require the travel firm that puts the holiday together to deliver what you asked for – and to make amends to address changes. Had your holiday been curtailed, you would have been entitled to a partial refund of the original package price. But as it was extended, the travel firm needs only to cover any extra costs: the unexpected hotel night and associated meals. You might also consult your travel insurance, in case it pays out a modest amount for a delay above eight hours (as mine does). But I am afraid that is all you can expect.

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