Travel Agent made c*ck up with booking

meluca

Hi, hope someone can give some advice,
My daughter and her boyfriend have booked a holiday through a high street travel agent to Tenerife leaving on 4/11 for 8 nights.On the holiday booking form issued to them it states 8 nights HALF BOARD. Yesterday they received the holiday confirmation which states that the holiday is SELF CATERING. They have phoned the travel agent but were told that the girl who actually booked it for them had made a mistake and that the holiday was never half board, is there anything they can do ?

hollydays

Well you dont have to accept it. What does she think is aceptable?complete cancellation or some money off? What are they prepared to offer? GUess they could just cancell it,in their best interests.

mutley74

i would ask to speak to the agent manager and ask them either to pay for the upgrade to HB or cancel and get another hol what you want..and see if they can offer you a discount for rebooking with them. if they dont help tekll me you will seek ABTA help. Its their mistake and they obviously know about it so they should rectify it.
best of luck

Ems!

I had a similar thing happen to me - iit wqas HB and AI though, basically , they said that the price i had paid was based on it being HB even though I had thought it was AI , so they wouldn't just upgrade it for free - we canme to a cpompromise cos i thought it was still worth it - think it was split roughlky 50 50. They offered me to cancel withouit losing deposit too... imagine they should get a similar deal.

meluca

Thanks for the replies, the travel agent in question won't budge on anything, they insist my dd paid for self catering even though the booking invoice says hb, they say only thing she can do is cancel and lose the deposit ( which she isn't prepared to do), so i guess they will be going on a pretty expensive sc holiday.
They will be putting in a complaint, hopefully they may get some joy from that.

vixarooni

if the booking invoice says half board then that is what your daughter should recieve.
Im a tourism student and we did some tourism laws. It states that anything written in the brochure must be carried out in the holiday, and if not compensation would have to be given. I dunno for sure if that would include the invoice.

But, i dunno where your daughter would stand because (i take it) she would have signed a document along the booking process stating that everything is correct. That might be the reason they are not budging because the contract is broken if you wanna cancel or something like that.

It might be worth ringing abta, seeing what the laws are concerning that one!

hollydays

If they have made the error and admit it-they cant keep her deposit.

bobstheboy

A little clarification is required.

At the travel agents, when looking at the brochure and hotel/apartment, there must have been a discussion as to the board basis being sought. Did the agent tell you daughter it was self catering but mistakenly wrote down half board on her copy of the booking form, or was it clear from the start that it was a half board holiday that was required ?

If it was stated it was self catering and the agent made a mistake and wrote down HB, then you are trying to get a freebie. If on the other hand it was a HB deal wanted from the start, I would not let this matter drop.

Bob

NH_Lokomotiv

If your daughter doesn't think it's worth the price for just SC, then she should stand her ground and demand to receive either what it says on the booking form she was originally given by the travel agent (who are wholly responsible for this mistake, not your daughter), or get a full refund...plus compensation for lost time and effort due to the incompetence of the travel agent.

Companies will try to get away with things like this because they know most people are basically good and reasonable and accept human errors occur, which would be fair enough, but do companies behave like this when the consumer makes a mistake and wants to change something from the original agreement? Of course not, they're greedy capitalists by nature.

Whenever a private company makes a mistake that inconveniences us or costs us money, we should treat them like they treat us and hold them fully responsible and also charge them administration charges for our time spent sorting out their mistake.