Booking a holiday - Beware!

I have posted about this subject before but the inevitable holiday adverts which arrive immediately after Christmas - have started up again. I want to encourage people to check reviews of the holiday companies very carefully. Some of them are just agents, and customers often have limited redress if anything goes wrong, either before or during the holiday.

There is a a holiday company - one especially - that has a catchy pop song and an irritating "blokey" voiceover, that I want to draw people's attention to.

My son booked a holiday three years ago using this company and it turned out the 5 star holiday resort in the online brochure was still in the process of being re-constructed/refurbished a week before we were due to fly out. - it was literally a building site. The company did not even inform us - my son only became aware of it because of posts he saw on Trip Advisor from very distressed holidaymakers. The company had misrepresented the hotel by posting computer generated images rather than photographs, without labelling them as such. The company tried to fob us off with a hotel that in no way matched the standard of the one we had paid for. However, I obtained legal advice and my solicitor, citing misrepresentation, ensured we got a replacement hotel that more than matched the one originally booked.

I was disguested at the way the company was treating so many people and continued to follow the reviews on a review site (Trust Pilot in this case, though there are others) and found it upsetting to read of families, often with young children or elderly/disabled relatives, who were left in the most awful situations - some arriving at disgustingly filthy and dangerous hotels, or arriving to find the hotel denying they had a booking.

On the face of it, the reviews look quite impressive in terms of percentage of excellent reviews. But, if analysed more carefully, most of the 5 star reviews are short and very similar in content (and often only refer to the booking process, not to the subsequent holiday). However, 14% of the reviews are 1 star only. They give some examples of terrible experiences - of flights being cancelled a matter of days before the holiday, of airports and times being changed without consultation, of further money being demanded even when customers had assumed the money they had paid up-front was a final price. Most importantly, customers were unable to contact anyone at the company, other than a "bot" which could only respond to limited and specific questions. People were left hanging on the phone for sometimes two or more hours, and, even if they managed to speak to someone, they were often cut off mid-conversation. (My son experienced this himself and so that was when we engaged a solicitor).

This company only really responds to complaints that are put on Trust Pilot. On the surface, responses seem very reasonable - "please give us more information and we will follow this up" - blah, blah, blah - but this is just a public relations exercise. In reality, the complaints are not followed up. If the company really wanted to assist, they would have people manning their own telephone lines - but there are so many people every day on Trust Pilot saying they have been trying for hours but can't speak to anyone.

I know how important a holiday is to everyone and I really want people to check on Trust Pilot and read not just the good reviews but the bad ones as well. Those bad reviews often refer not just to relatively minor things like the booking process but to very significant issues that can really cause an enormous amount of stress and ruin your holiday