poor holiday accomodation refund

joharell

Good evening, any assistance would be gratefully welcome. We are currently on holiday in Turkey, having booked our package, flights, transfers and accommodation with Holiday Mate. When we arrived at the accommodation on Tuesday, it clearly was not as described, in addition we had not hot water boiler so cold showers all around.

We met with the rep on Wednesday morning and during our 5 minute meeting, she was extremely unhelpful. Refused to look at the room, made a quick phone call back to the office and confirmed that there was no other accommodation available due to it being high season. We then asked to arrange flights home and she said that was not her problem. We then said what was the point of her if she would not help us.....and saw no point with continuing with the meeting.

We tried calling Holiday Mate in the UK, who said they were only acting as agents and we should deal with Falcon in Turkey, they have now refused to help us saying we were too aggressive...!

We have eventually managed to source alternative accommodation at an additional cost to us, as well as the cost of the new transfer.

This is an ATOL flight plus bonded holiday, paid for on a visa debit card. When we return to the UK, who should we seek a refund from for accommodation not as represented/described? Will it be under the ATOL guarantee or should we go via Section 75 on the visa debit card?

Any welcome advice would be gratefully appreciated.

McKneff

There is no section 75 on a debit card..... Section 75s only apply to credit cards.




You may have the protection of a chargeback on a Visa card thought.

budgetflyer

I suppose it really all depends what you paid for and what was described.
I have stayed in Turkey in October low season £1 a night b+b. It wasn't The Four Seasons, but the bed was clean , it had a shower and wc and we got eggs tomato ham cucumber olives and coffee for breakfast.
If i had paid £40 a night I would have been disapointed though

dzug1

You may struggle.


ATOL is not relevant to your circumstances


ATOL is a scheme that protects you from losing money or becoming stranded abroad if your travel company collapses

Section 75 is for credit cards only - though Visa does offer a separate scheme for debit cards. More importantly it doesn't apply to payments made through a third party - eg a travel agent


So I think your claim has to start with that travel agent as responsible for supplying what they have described and that you shouldn't have to get involved with their subcontractors



Was the hot water a general problem in the hotel or just your room? maybe you didn't know how to work it.

Have you posted this anywhere else - it looks remarkably familiar.

lea2012

What you should have done is perhaps spoken to the rep a little bit nicer, who would have then probably tried to assist you in finding other accommodation, although this would have still cost you I'm sure.

You'll be able to see on your price breakdown how much your hotel cost per person per night, and then you can decide if it was worth the money.

What you need to do now is contact Holiday Mate and tell them that you have checked out so that they can try and get you a bit of a refund from your first hotel. If you don't tell them you've left, they won't know and will probably be charged in full from the hotel. You may not be entitled to a refund, I don't know the terms of your booking but what I would suggest is that when you get home you write to Holiday Mate and include any photos of the poor accomm (I assume you will have done this) and ask them to investigate it for you.

Alan_Bowen

Holiday Mate are very naughty and their website may be legally misleading. On the Home Page it talks of selling you a 'package' which you would assume was a package holiday and if you had bought a package in the true sense, section 14 of the Package Travel Regulations allows you to insist on a return home and a full refund if the holiday is not as described and the operator fails to put things right. There are no similar rights if you buy bits of a holiday under the concept of Flight Plus, it isn't a package and you have separate contracts for the accommodation and the flights and transfers.

Their booking conditions make this clear but contradict their own Home Page at the moment. Get someone to take a screen short before they read this and change the words. You have no contract with Holiday Mates at all, the accommodation may be booked with and I suspect your contract is with, this company Falcon that you mention. The correct details of your contract should appear on your ATOL Certificate but almost certainly your contract will be subject to Turkish law, so good luck with that.

It is vital customers realise that saving money by not booking a package which is usually more expensive, does have a real downside and this is a case in point. Good luck, you are dependent on Falcon doing something to help or you making such a fuss that Holiday Mates put pressure on them to act. If not, ATOL cannot help, it provides financial protection against failure and has no consumer complaints handling system. Likewise you can't complain to ABTA who do have legally binding schemes to resolve disputes because you have booked with a company that is not a member of ABTA......

joharell

Thank you for all the comments on my listing. Just to update, we tried the official route of complaining to Holidaymate, who as you will probably guess just ignored our complaint. They are using a good old loophole in English Law, pretending to just be booking agents, which means that you have no redress with them if your holiday is not expected. They book your transfers and accomodation with their Turkish arm, Falcon Tourism, which surprisingly has the same directors and company address registered at Companies House. But acting as agents means that when things go wrong they don't have to resolve anything.

As we booked and paid by debit card, we were as correctly advised not covered by Section 75, however we have managed to successfully claim a refund by the VisaDebit Chargeback scheme.

Tough lesson to learn, which resulted in a really poor holiday holiday experience. Thank you for the advice :T:T

littlereddevil

I've never know Turkish hotels have hot water boilers, usually solar power. I'm surprised this didn't heat the water in August, given the temperatures there. What else was wrong with the hotel?