Sadly what you are experiencing is one of the draw backs in doing a DIY holiday. If booking separate parts of a holiday and one part goes wrong - the other components of the holiday often can not be changed without a penalty.

Have you looked at alternative airlines flying ABZ/LPA? Other options might be a flight ABZ/TFS with a connecting flight between Tenerife and Gran Canaria. What about seeing if there are reasonable priced flights available down to MAN or LGW. Both have lots of flights to LPA (a high number on a Monday) - or, whilst a long drive an option from GLA to LPA?

Regretably I don't think any solution will come without a sizeable cost implication.

Traveller

Thanks for your reply which I appreciate. ABZ has very limited availability in the summer and even worse in the winter. There are no other operators to LPA. To fly to MAN of LGW you are looking at at least £150 plus possible overnighters so that will be out of the question. EDI or GLA are options but I really do not want the drive from Aberdeen and that is the reason we booked the new route from Aberdeen.

Lesson learned the hardway. I am very annoyed with myself as well as I was going to book the accom direct with Cordial Canaries and would have paid in Euros but as the Euro rate is so dire just now it was actually around £35 cheaper to book with Thomsons. I wish I had not bothered to save that £35 and booked direct as Cordial Canx charges was only 18 euros so lesson learned the very hard way.

Never ever will I book at low cost flight again and it is terrible that this can leave people in this situation. The girl I spoke to at Globespan was very nice and sympathetic and told me she spoke to a lady this morning who had booked her accom 10 minutes before the email came through advising of the cancellation and she has been stung for 100% costs.

I keep trying to put it in perspective and as my mum said I have my health and that is more important than anything which is very very true but still cannot help feeling gutted.

You have my sympathy as this happened to us with Globespan last year. We had booked ABZ-ALC for Xmas and they pulled out of Aberdeen for the winter season. However I didn´t think twice about it and rebooked to fly from EDI, even though it is a 4 hour drive for us. I would rather have the drive than no holiday at all, but I can see why you don´t want to.

It was many, many years before we flew direct from Aberdeen and in fact I think we have flown to Europe less than 5 times from there. We have always gone from GLA or EDI as the choice from Aberdeen, even in the summer, is so limited so driving down/back is second nature and we have done it several times in the winter with no real problems.

We got stung this time too. We were due to fly back from Alicante today to arrive in GLA at 13.05. The flight has been changed twice and we now get back, assuming it´s on time, at 22.15 and have a 4-1/2 hour flight after picking up the car, etc and should get home around 3.30am.

luci

Thanks Luci and sorry it happened to you too. Sorry to hear re your flights time change as well and I have read that Globepsan are notorious for that. What is more annoying is that they honestly cannot care about you the customer and the implications their actions have and how it affects people. It is ridiculous that they can get away with how they treat people, but sadly they do.

I know we could go from EDI or GLA although we would have had to change the day which would have involved changing accommodation dates and more costs with Thomsons to amend that, however I really do not want the drive from ABZ to EDI or GLA and I do admire you for facing the 4 hour drive at the start and at the end of your holiday.

We normally do "not the norm" holidays ie Lakes & Mountains and into Bavaria and Black Forest so we nearly always fly from ABZ mainly with British Airways or KLM. This would have been our first "normal" desitination holiday for 6 years.

Hope you have had a nice time in ALC and welcome back to the cold Granite City!

You should consider taking City Link to Glasgow or Edinburgh. We did that once as on the way back from holiday we were getting picked up at 2am and didn't fancy driving home after no sleep. I was not looking forward to it but it was surprisingly quick and so less stressful than driving. I would do that again.
When I saw Fly Globespan had announced the new flights I wondered how long it would take to cancel them. Surely they do such a thing as market research before they introduce new routes but they have cancelled routes so often now its becoming a farce. I am using them to fly to Cyprus this year but am going to wait till late on just in case.

Fiona

Thanks for that. I never really thought about alternative transport however I would have a hard job persuading hubby to get on a bus!!!

I really should have gone with my gut feeling and booked the accommodation direct, however hindsight is always a wonderful thing.
Hope all works out with your flights and trip to Cyprus.