You may have it all planned out.  You’ve got your transportation books, your tickets purchased, your hotel room reserved, and you’re ready to go!  Then something happens—there’s a sudden illness in the family, a natural disaster strikes your home town, or some other uncontrollable event happens, and you realise there’s no way you can go on your trip.  When that happens, you have no choice but to cancel your trip.

You need to cancel your reservations as soon as you know you won’t be able to go on your trip.  Many hotels and forms of transportation have cancellation deadlines.  If you cancel after these deadlines, you may not be able to get all or even most of your payment back.  This may mean you end up paying for airline tickets or a hotel room that you don’t get to use.  If that ends up being the case, see if you can get credit for another time.  If you can’t, you may want to transfer your reservations and such to someone who can go out of town.  It’s better that one of your family members or friends make use of your tickets and reservations rather than spending money on something that no one gets to use.

Event tickets are often non-refundable no matter what.  In this case, you can either give them to someone else or attempt to re-sell them.  Some people put their tickets up on eBay or other online auction sites.  If you don’t have time for that and don’t have a friend to give them to, you may be out of luck and will have to accept the loss of your money.

Cancelling your holiday is very disappointing, but losing all of your investment is even worse.  While you may be dealing with some horrible event during the time, but try to find a few minutes to deal with cancellations so you can save as much as you can.