Cancelled Travel and Accommodation
Case reference FOI2026/02047
Received 25 August 2026
Published 21 September 2026
Request
Please provide the following information for the 2025/26 financial year and 2026/27 financial year to date. Please exclude bookings where the Council received a full refund and therefore incurred no net cost:
1. The total number of flights, train tickets, taxis, hotel bookings and other travel/accommodation bookings paid for by the Council which were subsequently cancelled or unused, where the Council incurred a financial cost and received no corresponding service.
2. The total cost to the Council of these cancelled or unused bookings.
Response
Please provide the following information for the 2025/26 financial year and 2026/27 financial year to date. Please exclude bookings where the Council received a full refund and therefore incurred no net cost:
1. The total number of flights, train tickets, taxis, hotel bookings and other travel/accommodation bookings paid for by the Council which were subsequently cancelled or unused, where the Council incurred a financial cost and received no corresponding service.
2. The total cost to the Council of these cancelled or unused bookings.
Answer: This information is not held centrally and is not generally recorded or held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
This information may be held at a granular level, however, to ascertain whether the data requested is held, each member of staff in Herefordshire Council would have to check their individual calendars to see when any travel/accommodation was booked and the staff member would have to recall whether or not they attended. Currently there are 1,598 staff members in Herefordshire Council.
Once the members of staff have ascertained they did not attend their travel and/or accommodation arrangements, further checks would then be required against any department credit card statements, with the Finance Team for any invoices raised against specific travel and accommodation cost codes, and to check individual Business World (system used by the council officers to record financial transactions) accounts to determine whether any refunds had been processed. Once these details had been identified (if held), this would need to be noted and once all avenues had been checked in this way, the total figures requested could be calculated.
It is estimated that it would take at least 15 minutes for individual staff to check calendars and a further 30 minutes to check all avenues once staff have identified they did not attend their travel and/or accommodation arrangements.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 399 hours just for all staff members to check their individual calendars; more time would be added once staff identified they did not attend their travel and/or accommodation arrangements. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
In accordance with our duty to provide advice and assistance under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, we have considered whether there is any way in which your request could be refined to bring it within the appropriate cost limit. However, as information relating to cancelled or unused travel and accommodation bookings is not routinely recorded or held centrally, and there is no reliable means of identifying relevant records without carrying out extensive enquiries with individual members of staff, we are unable to suggest a refinement that would enable the requested information to be located and extracted within the statutory time limit.
Documents
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