Two weeks ago, we booked a holiday to Curaçao at Corendon from July 6. Air travel, car and a nice house at Livingstone Resort in Jan Thiel. How we had looked forward to this. Until today when we received an email that Livingstone is not open at all. I find it very misleading that there was no warning when booking that certain hotels may not be available due to the coronavirus.
Corendon rebooks us to another hotel, which happens to be the Corendon Mangrove Beach Resort, of their own. Here they do not have a house or apartment, so we cannot get the same facilities as we had booked. Moreover, this hotel is not located in Jan Thiel, or in any other cozy place, but in a remote location, so we always have to go by car when we want to go somewhere. That this is an all-inclusive hotel is irrelevant to us. We do not like that at all. We like to eat somewhere different every day or to cook differently ourselves.
If we want to go to a hotel or apartment other than this one, we must choose something from Corendon’s website and pay the additional cost. For something equivalent to what we initially booked, that comes to over 800 euros extra! And a trip to Curaçao during the holiday period is not that cheap.
Another option is to cancel the trip free of charge and accept a voucher. But we certainly do not want that. We just want the vacation we booked and what we were looking forward to.
Especially in these times when the travel industry is struggling, we did not expect information about the possibility of a closed hotel to be withheld. Then we would have given extra thought to whether we should book at the moment.
Can they do it this way? What are our rights?
Marsha Koteris,
The Netherlands
