* Cosmos Holidays Customer Reviews: can't find any *

PhylPho

We're currently trying to figure out how to spend our ClubCard Deals before the x4 exchange ratio drops to x3. Mrs P has always fancied going to Rome, so we're looking at Cosmos 'Tourama' 8 day Rome, Sorrento & Capri package. Accommodation details are scant so we've used Tripadvisor to check reviews for Cosmos's hotel choice in Rome, the Parco Tirreno.

This gives every impression of having been an apartment block -- in a none-too ritzy area of Rome -- converted with varying degrees of success into a hotel. It's a 15-minute walk from the Metro and of the seven nights in the package, three are to be spent there.

TripAdvisor reports are not encouraging. We thought we'd check to see if this hotel features in reviews by Cosmos customers, so used this link:

http://www.cosmostourama.co.uk/content/holiday-reviews.php

But have got nowhere. We can't access any reviews, and this despite the Cosmos statement that its customers "send us wonderfully in depth reviews from a perspective that our itinerary descriptions just cannot capture. We have published hundreds of them."

Googling for cached Cosmos customer reviews yields no sign of the "hundreds" of reviews, either. Is it our computer / Internet link that's playing up -- or has anyone else had a problem, trying to find out what Cosmos customers *truly* think of Cosmos holidays?

There's certainly no such problem when checking out Thomson Holiday customer reviews.

richardw

If the hotels ain't good, perhaps just avoid.

PhylPho

richardw wrote: »

If the hotels ain't good, perhaps just avoid.

We're coming round to that conclusion. Looks increasingly like a money-trap chosen by the operator because it's so inaccessible that holidaymakers dumped in it *have* to sign up for exorbitant 'optional' excursions just to get out of the hotel.

We've heard of the money-trap tactic berfore, and the fact that Cosmos deliberately isn't offering dinner on any of the three nights in that hotel makes it pretty much a textbook illustration of that kind of fast-buck operation.

Stuff Cosmos, then -- though we still can't figure out where the "hundreds of customer reviews" have vanished to. . . unless they never appeared in the first place.

mich_city

try archers for cosmos reviews, they are the same holidays.. and much cheaper! - just cant use CC vouchers tho sadly

http://www.archersdirect.co.uk/

PhylPho

mich_city wrote: »

try archers for cosmos reviews, they are the same holidays.. and much cheaper! - just cant use CC vouchers tho sadly

http://www.archersdirect.co.uk/

Well I never! As we don't have much experience of package tour operators, we'd never heard of Archers. And of course, you're right; the brochures from Archers and Cosmos are page-for-page identical, except that Cosmos prices are significantly higher.

(For the holiday we were considering -- "Rome, Vesuvius, Capri & Sorrento" ex Liverpool -- the Cosmos price is £1,025 per person. Whereas the identical holiday under the Archers brand is £945 per person. Buying this under the Cosmos brand represents an immediate waste of £160. A similar waste of money applies with every other Cosmos-branded holiday.)

It would seem a Cosmos Holiday is only worth considering if it's on a special offer that takes it below Archers. But then, presumably, a special offer from Archers would go lower than that. So no point in throwing money away on Cosmos there then.

That only leaves Cosmos as a holiday of choice for users of Tesco ClubCard deals -- as in our case.

However, seeing as how the current £400 per person Deals allowance is to drop to £300, and the Deals are to reduce in value from x4 to x3, the Cosmos "offer" in the ClubCard deals programme grows ever more unattractive.

Sincere thanks then, mich_city, for the info.

(Oh, as to 'customer reviews', the Archers website manages to feature them from everywhere other than Europe: it's a blind link. As Cosmos's 'hundreds of pages' are likewise hidden from view -- including the Europe section -- one has to wonder just what the experience of both Cosmos and Archers European holiday customers has been at the hands of this operator.)

withabix

Cosmos and Archers are both part of Monarch. They are the 3rd largest tour operator in the UK.

Most holidays are now sold under the Monarch brand
(and are usually cheaper)

We have used them for flights and package holidays and they are the same as all of the others. There is really no tour operator service in resort with any of them now. Anyway, do you REALLY want to pay for something you don't really use??


As for multi-level pricing of the same holiday, ALL of the tour operators do it.

Thomas Cook and their many brands
Thomson and their many brands
Monarch and their brands

etc
etc
etc

PhylPho

Thanks withabix. By coincidence, we've been talking to a friend this morning who used to be in the travel industry and was at one time employed directly by Globus Travel Group, which is the owner of Monarch, Cosmos, and Gawd knows what else.

The worldwide operation is apparently controlled by a fairly secretive private company headed by two Swiss families, one of whom (the Mantegazzas) started the whole thing 80 years ago.

Our friend said Globus decided to bring Cosmos under the Monarch umbrella in a re-branding exercise two or three years ago -- Monarch Holidays was supposed to replace Cosmos Holidays -- but the exercise failed badly because it "was daft to place the weaker brand above the stronger brand".

The exercise had something to do with buttering up to the travel industry itself (i.e., High Street travel agents) and a decision (at that time) to make the Cosmos brand only available through retail outlets, hence the relatively high margins built into the prices (though the customer always pays for everything, in this case the idea was to hit the customer for an even bigger amount of travel agent commission.)

Apparently that strategy has gone wrong as well (Globus is a shambolic organisation, says my friend) so nowadays, Monarch Holidays hasn't subsumed Cosmos Holidays and Cosmos Holidays is available via both the High Street and the Internet, while Archers Direct is running as the on-line equivalent of a Cosmos that's gone on-line anyway but Globus would rather not overly publicise the link between the two.

All sounds anything but transparent to me. Nice work for that Mantegazza guy though (assuming he's still alive?) I did a quick Google just now and the Sunday Times Rich List for 2004 put his personal wealth at £1,540 million.

(And the greedy sod still wants Cosmos / Archers holidaymakers to be dumped for 3 nights in some tacky out-of-the-way hotel in Rome with breakfast only included in hope the poor mugs will sign up to over-priced excursions just to be able to get somewhere where they'll be able to eat? Shame. Then again though, no-one ends up with a £1.5 billion fortune by being nice.)

[Deleted User]

That only leaves Cosmos as a holiday of choice for users of Tesco ClubCard deals -- as in our case

There are still alot of people that would only deal with a high street travel agent particulary after this summer with the ash and people going bust and that is where Cosmos comes in. We used Archers Direct this year for a touring trip in America which was great but before we left I had alook at Trip Adviser and we were changing hotel most days and the reviews were so bad I struggled to tell my wife that 50% we would not have booked but as it turned out we would stay at every one again and it made me feel disillusioned about Trip Adviser reports. I am not trying to influence you on which holiday you have but point out there are two side to most things.

PhylPho

shrimper1 wrote: »

> I had alook at Trip Adviser and we were changing hotel most days and the reviews were so bad I struggled to tell my wife that 50% we would not have booked but as it turned out we would stay at every one again and it made me feel disillusioned about Trip Adviser reports. I am not trying to influence you on which holiday you have but point out there are two side to most things.

Couldn't agree more: like a lot of good-ideas-at-the-time (for example, Web of Trust) TripAdvisor has been seriously devalued. We long since stopped depending on T/A and instead use it as but one reference resource amongst many, because where hotels/destinations are concerned, a Google search generally throws up several review sites like Ciao etc.

We prefer to take notice of reviews from verified customers (booking.com is our favorite, but then, we use booking.com a lot) which is why we thought we'd check out the views of returning Cosmos holidaymakers on the Cosmos site. . . hence the query at the start of this thread.

Anyway, like you, we think we'll use our x4 vouchers while we can on a different Cosmos holiday than our proposed Rome foray.

The identical holiday in the Archers-brand brochure is £120 less (for 2 people) than the Cosmos-brand brochure, so in a sense, that's an immediate waste of £30sworth of ClubCard Deals. But then, the Deals at their pre-December 5th rate will still pay for a 'free' holiday for one of us, so can't grumble.

Other than that though, and thanks to mich city's post, we'll stay well clear of the Cosmos brand. (And after December 5th, when the ClubCard Deals value drops to a x3 multiple, and only £300 is allowable per person on a Cosmos booking, the waste of Deals vouchers on funding Cosmos's deliberate over-pricing looks like making Cosmos's continuing inclusion in the Tesco scheme all a bit pointless anyway.)

mich_city

strange there are no europe reviews on any of their sites.. I found the archers ones when looking for reviews for our tourama USA trip so didnt look for europe..

am in the same boat and have tesco CC vouchers to use up.. am looking for turkey next june with cosmos.. the price for two of us £771 self catering apt with cosmos..

just priced the exact same holiday with travel republic and it comes out at £498.33 :mad:

I always take trip advisor reviews with a pinch of salt.. some people are so picky its unreal some of the gripes you read on there..

PhylPho

Weirdly, this entire exercise has become a lesson in holiday pitfalls (as far as we're concerned.)

By going through various Cosmos holidays in the 'Tourama' brochure, we've been able to see how the operator:

* restricts the number of dinners included in the price;

* uses hotels that aren't that convenient and so is able to:

* up-spend captive travellers to expensive 'optional' excursions that -- at extortionate cost -- allow 'em to get off the premises and actually get something to eat.

As both Cosmos and Archers' websites have not one word of the '100s of reviews we've published' about Europe, the appeal of touring holidays -- in Europe at any rate; can't speak for anywhere else -- has just become minimal.