Covid Gala Cancellations

I wonder if any railways have experienced ticket cancellations for their Christmas services by passengers concerned about the increase in Covid infection rates? According to the news media this is certainly having an impact on the hospitality sector.

 

I noticed earlier on social media that one railway has had some cancellations and they were offering the tickets for resale. I wonder if there will be a sudden wave of cancellations for railway events as the daily cases begin to rise towards the 100,000 mark? Surely there will be a knock on effect with railway staff/volunteers isolating which is starting to cause problems in other areas of society.
Away from the railway world this afternoon and this evening a number of sporting events were cancelled and it appears concerts and music events are now being cancelled by the artists as they fear it is too dangerous to stage them for the large audiences. It has been very worrying to read reports today of packed cinemas for the new Spiderman Film. I hope that we do not get super spreader incidents from the sold out screenings.

Sent from my XQ-BT52 using Tapatalk

 

You know, with all this worrying about catching Covid, cancellations and people just generally being SO scared they are just rude - it really puts you off Christmas.

2022 looks like yet another year where your better just staying in bed and waiting for the next one to be better.

 

The Mid Suffolk Light Railway event on 1st Jan 2022 has been postponed to later in the year....
https://www.mslr.org.uk/visit-us/#event-14133

 

Not quite what the original question was asking about, but Cholsey & Wallingford cancelled their last few days of ‘Polar Express’ due to Covid-related staff absence - see notice on their website.

In a more general sense I’m not sure what you would do about pre-booked visitors cancelling at short notice either due to their own need to isolate or due to general uneasiness about mingling in the world.

Late in 2020 I booked a concert ticket and was offered the option of paying a premium to give some kind of cover if I had to cancel; in the small print this excluded Covid which seemed especially pointless so I declined. Having been to another large concert in November, they seem pretty hot on Covid passes in that industry which offers some reassurance, but in a crowd of thousands there will be someone who slips through the net (asymptomatic so not tested, for example), and social distancing is largely impossible in that sort of environment. At the end of the day, it’s a chance I chose to take when I booked the ticket.

In the holiday industry they seem to be offering full refunds because quite frankly what else can they do? Nobody would book at all otherwise. So the industry has to take the hit, with whatever limited support they can get from government (about which, I’ve no idea).

Where do heritage railways’s sit on this spectrum? It’s a difficult one, they probably don’t make enough money to simply run a half empty train and offer full refunds, especially for an event with higher overheads like Santa trains. At the same time they rely heavily on goodwill and don’t want to alienate their supporters. All I know is, if I was planning a big gala right now I would be a little nervous.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Obviously social distancing requirements had an effect on capacity but the Santa trains plus Boxing Day and New Years Day services on the IOWSR were fully booked.

 

That's just being paranoid Covid is now going to be with us until we gain some natural immunity to it, hopefully having a booster each year should help us to live a semi normal life, My brother and his wife both got it, and they said it was no worse to them than a cold, they said, had they not tested, they would have never have know they had it, but their daughter, had it quite bad, but not bad enough to be hospitalised, So be cautious yes, work around the restrictions but try to live as normal a life as you can, having to mask up isnt that big a deal, to be honest for most of us, Try wearing an NBC suit and mask , for even just a couple of days, i had to on an army exercise a few years ago and that's real uncomfort, and as it was in Wiltshire, near Salisbury, a certain establishment dropped something on us, from the air, we were told it was CS, But who knows, it could have been anything, Compared to that, social distancing, and wearing masks is nothing.