Thomson changed our holiday

kateshep_2

Hi
I hope I'm posting in the right forum, apologies if not
I have a question regarding my rights re a holiday due to be taken this July but booked last august.
We specifically booked early to get the holiday we wanted flying on the date we wanted as I was concerned how prices would be affected with the changes to the school holiday rules. We live in Poole Dorset so booked to fly from bournemouth. We booked a thomson family resorts holiday as they have a kids club which starts at 3 years which means both my kids can go in together and the reps and other kids will speak English plus they are crb checked etc. They also have thomson the dog which my kids love. So we found the perfect holiday and booked it. However today I got an email from thomson saying this resort will no longer be a family resort but a first choice one and the kids club will be a hotel run one starting age 4. We would not have booked this hotel on this basis. When I rang thomson they offered me 3 choices : to cancel, to choose a different holiday but if that would have a higher price then we would have to pay this higher price or they offered us two alternative holidays : one flying from gatwick which is a 3 hr drive each way and incurs petrol costs plus extra parking costs. The other one was a hotel not as nice as the one we chose with a hotel run kids club.
What are my rights? To my mind thomson should within reason let us choose another holiday and if it is more expensive (within reason) then they should incur that cost. As I see it the options they have provided us with are either not the same as we originally booked or are more expensive for us. Surely they should be liable for something?!?

Any advice gratefully received

ThumbRemote

Your first option will be to find another holiday you like the look of, and compare the prices. It may be that they haven't changed that much since last August, so you can find something you like in the right range.

Your difficulty is that you don't know how much prices have changed since you booked. You can't get a price for your holiday now, as that holiday doesn't exist any more, so you can't show that they've gone up since August. As such, it's hard to know how much worse (or better, if the prices have dropped) off you are.

Maybe they'll offer you something as a goodwill gesture if you ask.

giraffe69

When this happened to me it was a hotel removed from the brochure. We chose another hotel and they started arguing about increased price. It was no good speaking to the initial person on the desk. They didn't have the authority to do anything. In the end persistence and talking someone higher up got the new hotel at the same price as the old. We weren't talking a huge amount of money but their attitude of "well, you'll just have to pay and lump it" really got up my nose