OVER the past seven months, a family from Wimborne have experienced numerous travel nightmares.

Steph O’Hara bore the brunt of the various travel issues which affected the UK recently, the most recent being Flybe’s collapse into administration.

Last August, she booked a holiday to Turkey for August 2020 through Thomas Cook, who went bust only a few weeks after her booking.

Steph said: “It was a bit of a disappointment, but we got all our money back before Christmas.”

With their summer holiday plans for this year gone out the window, the family decided to focus on their upcoming February ski holiday in France with friends.

Set to depart on February 9, Steph’s travel plans seemed to be unaffected until the morning of their flight to Geneva.

Steph said: “We woke up on the morning of our flight from Bournemouth and were told that it was cancelled because of the storm. Luckily we managed to rebook a flight for the next day from Gatwick, but we had a lot of problems with Hertz car hire.

“Although our booking was only a day later, they charged us an additional £900 on top of the £300 we had already paid.”

Despite their issues with car hire, Steph managed to receive a refund from Easyjet for their original flight but their travel disruption didn’t stop there. Steph said: “While we were at the ski resort in France, we were keeping our eyes on the weather and saw that another storm was coming.

“We booked ourselves a new return flight to Bournemouth Airport, we had to take that gamble.”

Steph’s gamble paid off, as their original return flight home was cancelled due to Storm Dennis.

After spending a day stranded in Geneva, Steph and family eventually returned home.

Once home and safe, Steph and her husband Andy were looking forward to Andy’s 40 birthday weekend getaway in Amsterdam, planned for the weekend of March 7.

But the evening of March 4 put pay to their celebratory mini break.

Steph said: “I was reading about Flybe on Twitter and later found out they had gone into administration. We have received emails from Flybe, but it was a package holiday booked through loveholidays.com, and we haven’t had any updates from them yet.”

Although the family may have lost out on yet another holiday, Steph is pleased that they found out about Flybe prior to their departure, avoiding being stranded in Amsterdam.

She said: “I really hope that’s it now. We’ve never had problems like this before. But there are people who have lost their jobs. It’s one of those things, it was just a holiday for us. At least our next break is in our caravan.”