Supposed To Be Going To Corfu Next Wk - Letter About Pool This Morning!

Zoetoes

hi

Weve had thi booked for about 10 months, Corfu, Roda Beach Village going 16th May, £1,800. I spent ages going through reviews to find the ideal holiday for us.

We got a letter this morning saying that the main pool (there are 3 but one is a smaller one and one is a kids one) is out of use for safety reasons.

I rang them today and was told that they are still waiting for more information but as far as she knows it's dark and cloudy (it's sea water) and you can't see the bottom.

Although there is the other smaller pool there will be too many people using it as it's a holiday village.

What do we do?

littlereddevil

Ask them for another accomodation or take your money back and go somewhere else

Hadventure

From what you have written it looks like this pool will be closed if you go away and stay in the village you booked in so you could contact the travel vendor and ask for a refund, compensation or exchange. Depending on how good their service is this may resolve it.

If this fails another point of call is ABTA if the company is ABTA bonded, they usually give good advice, but prefer you to contact the provider first. A final port of call, if you have insurance, would be your insurance company. If you are entitled to claim a call to them telling them that the pool has been closed and that you plan to claim on return may result in them, a bigger organisation, putting pressure on the travel agent – so they don’t have to pay out.

There are some legal approaches too…

I'm not 100% sure about this but somewhere in brochures or on letters from travel companies there should be some legal reference to the description of holiday or 'description of services'. This may include the company’s liability and their obligation to inform you of events such as this. Check that they are informing you within the required time period, if there is one.

It would be a good idea to find out why the pool is closed. If this was planned work or the company you booked with had ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect the pool would be closed (such as yearly maintenance works or it never gets serviced) you can claim your money back as they did not inform you at the time of booking. It is also worth noting that unless the pool is ancient there are not many problems with pools that keep them out of action for a long period of time. The most common problem is a broken pump, thus the pool turns cloudy, usually a new pump can be fitted within a week so I’d really probe this area.

If the pool is closed due to a mechanical failure and the company is a reputable or well known one they may have insurance that will cover this. In many cases companies will pay the owner of the complex less so it could be easy to obtain compensation direct from the company.

In short find out as much information as you can and contact your travel agent enquiring about these options. I can only begin to imagine how much of a stress this is so don’t worry too much and good luck!

Post back here what you get told and I’m sure we can all advise you as best we can.

Dave
:cool: :cool:

Hadventure

OH and I forgot, if the travel agent dont know why the pool is closed phone the place yourself! Use a cheap international calling number (they are listed somewhere on this site) and find out off them. If it was planned the company you booked with will be reluctant to tell you so call the hotel, just enquiring, dont tell them you have a stay booked there and see what the reply is!

Dave

Zoetoes

Hi

They've said we can change if we want to, hubby was hoping to change it to Turkey (might it be to be a bit closer to Istanbul???), I decided to stick with Corfu and just hope the pool's sorted. Thanks for the help.