Cancelling only one passenger in a booking

Question

I have bought a ticket for me and someone else, from Madrid to Buenos Aires, via eDreams. I purchased cancellation insurance along with my ticket.

My partner can no longer travel on the given date, and the reasons for this fall under what the insurance should cover. I, however, can still travel, and intend to fly on the planned date.

I thought I would be able to cancel only half of the booking, somehow modify the reservation to only cover myself, or something along those lines, and then submit a claim to the insurance company to be refunded for half of the price (minus fees or whatever).

However, I can't find any option to do this on eDreams website. I'm starting to suspect what I have to do is cancel the whole ticket and book a new one. But I'm worried that if I do that, the insurance would only pay for half of the booking, since I am still fine with traveling on the scheduled date.

Cancelling the whole ticket, getting refunded for half, and then buying a new ticket would be more expensive than flying solo with my existing booking.

What is the proper way to handle this? I see three options

1. Cancel whole ticket, get new ticket, work it out with insurance and they should cover the whole cancellation.
2. Eat the cost, insurance doesn't actually cover this case. Should have bought two tickets separately.
3. Some way to actually change the booking that I haven't found. I can't find a way to reach eDreams to see if this is something they can do.

Answer 1

Unfortunately that's tricky.

Currently your reservation is a single unit with the a single PNR (Passenger Name Record). That's for a good reason: if there are delays or rerouting, you still all want to stay together.

However to do a change only for a single passenger the PNR needs to be split into multiple individual reservations, each with its own PNR. Airlines can certainly do this, but I'm not sure that a broker like eDreams can.

You need to look carefully at the terms and conditions. eDreams is actually just a contract broker. From https://www.edreams.com/images/shared/pdf/EN/flight_conditions.pdf

When You purchase travel services through this Platform, You will enter into two agreements: (a) one agreement directly with the Travel Supplier(s) relating to the supply of the ordered travel service and (b) one agreement with eDreams relating to the supply of a mediation service. Unless expressly indicated, eDreams acts as a Disclosed Agent for You and does not enter into any contractual relationship with You and/or the Travel Supplier relating to the services that You purchase on this Platform. Any query or consultation relating to services purchased on this Platform must be addressed to the Travel Supplier which has supplied the travel service to You.

This clearly states that they will not service you, but any "query" needs to addressed to the airline directly. However, airline often don't want to service reservations from 3rd parties and that's often part of their terms and conditions. So you may have agreed to a "no service" contract, which is often a risk when booking through 3rd parties. Customer service is not cheap and the savings need to come from somewhere.

Your best bet is to make an online account with the airline and associate the PNR with your account. Then check the website and see of you can split it there. If not (likely), call them up and ask nicely. I don't think they are required to help you there, so you may have to try a few times to get a sympathetic agent.

If you manage to split it, things become a lot easier: Now you have two separate reservations and you can cancel one and keep one.

The other route is to check with the insurance and read the terms and conditions of the contract. There should be some language in there that describes what happens in this case, however it might be hard to understand and hard to find.