cottages4you.co.uk conning consumers into paying for travel insurance

jonlgore

I have recently taken out a holiday cottage booking with cottages4you.co.uk. Proceeding through my booking I found that personal travel insurance had automatically been added to my booking and I could not find any way to remove this on the website. After completing my booking I complained to the firm and asked for an explanation of why the option of removing insurance was so well hidden, and how they were going to make this more obvious to consumers. They refunded the travel insurance but have given me no answer to my question.

After much research I have found out the route to do this. For an example, you can click the link below to take you to a sample booking

http://www.cottages4you.co.uk/uce/c4y?action=readAvailability&view=&startdate=01/4/2007&cottageId=419204&duration=7

If you click “Book” to proceed with the booking you are taken to the “Making your reservation” screen, where you are informed that the company offers travel insurance and you can remove this later if you wish. There is nothing anywhere in the process telling you how to do this.

Clicking “Next” takes you to the “Holiday details” screen. If you click the “Details” small print next to the Personal travel insurance option (it is easy to miss this) you are taken to a separate window containing all the small print and only at the very bottom of that window do you have the option of removing travel insurance.

This strikes me as a very underhanded approach and one which cons consumers. It has taken me 15 mins of research to find out how to do this – many people would not have that time, and still may not be able to find out how to do this.

Is there any official way of taking action against the company and forcing them to change this?

Clive_Woody

I had the same problem, I phoned the booking through in the end as I couldn't be bothered to hunt around to find where they had hidden the option to remove the insurance premium, and even then they tried the hard sell with the insurance.

They also changed our booking quite late on, we had a look at the new cottage and said it looked fine. We forgot to check for a shower in the bathroom. When we got down to Devon we discovered there was a bath with a pathetic shower attachment with water pressure so low that if you held it more than 3 foot above the bottom of the bath the water stopped flowing.

Not overly impressed to be honest.

Bernard_Coleslaw

jonlgore wrote:

This strikes me as a very underhanded approach and one which cons consumers. It has taken me 15 mins of research to find out how to do this – many people would not have that time, and still may not be able to find out how to do this.

Is there any official way of taking action against the company and forcing them to change this?

I would assume they're acting as an agent or introducer for the insurer, and so would be regulated for insurance business by the FSA. The FSA takes a very dim view of sales practices like this.

Zebedee69

Thats dodgy, I know Easy jet do the same but they have a "remove" button.

Unfortunately this practice is getting more common than ever with the internet. My mum was duped in the same way by Travel City Direct, exact same thing - adding extras onto the holiday. Its a pain in the !!!!!

I think the problem should go to the FSA like Bernard says.

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Mark_Trumpet

We've had same problem with a further development. Upon booking, I selected an option that gave the details of our preexisting travel insurance policy and deselected the cottages4you insurance options to make the travel insurance premium from them zero. I've just checked our invoice from them and they've charged an extra £137 for insurance that I didn't buy!

Inevitably I can't get through on the phone but will persevere.

PS not keen on the 1.5% credit card surcharge either. This appeared on our invoice and I can't recall it being included in the original quote. Legal experts - is this misrepresentation?