Post by annon99 on Feb 19, 2018 11:40:02 GMT 1
In the Travel Pages of the Times (on Saturdays) there's a column bearing this title.
Basically, readers with a complaint about their travel experience are invited to write in. The columnist acts as their Consumer Champion and takes up the complaint with the travel company/airline and tries to get them compensation.
A family had recently spend £14,000 (!) on a trip to Florida, only to find that their hotel was next to a building site, and they were disturbed each morning by the noise. For which inconvenience they wanted a full refund.....(!!!!).
The travel company had offered them £1000, and after the columnist's intervention, £2000, but that wasn't good enough, the family still wanted a full refund....
I've never travelled abroad yet without there being some delay/hiccup/disappointment. I don't expect the reality of the holiday to be the same as the silky smooth promise in the advertisement. I was once seduced by an advertisement for a safari, and was particularly taken by the promise to see lions in the wild. The nearest we got to a single lion was a mile away, viewed by my own powerful binoculars. Did I complain? Had I complained the travel company could reasonably have argued that they'd provided a view of bare-breasted Maori women instead, not promised in the advertisement, and, as a young man, valued just as highly (if not more!) than lions....
The point being that when you travel abroad you take the rough with the smooth. If you want compensating for some disappointment, be ready to pay the travel company for any bonus too...
Of course we don't know if the family received any surprise bonus to off-set their disappointment. What we do know is that they were ready to splash out £14K on a luxury holiday, (when they could've, say, given £10K to charity and spent £4K in the UK) and by spending so much their expectations were so high that nothing less than perfection would do....
So whenever I read the column, featuring Mr & Mrs Moaner every week, I think to myself that it's hard to find sympathy for them, in fact I tell myself 'Don't Put Up With This', annon....
