Virgin call costs

liz1506

Can anyone advise?
We had to return from our holiday in the US back in March. Virgin cancelled our April flights because of the upcoming lockdown and we had to spend a lot of time on calls (many on hold for over an hour, and some which were on hold and then cut off) to them to book new flights before lockdown, as they were not answering emails or texts. These calls cost us £500! We submitted a claim for reimbursement to them at the end of March, they replied in April with a case number and we've heard nothing since. Do we have any right to reimbursement of the call costs as the original flights were not cancelled by us?

jon81uk

Legally companies need to provide a customer service number that is an 01,02,03 number so there are no additional costs.
http://www.fairtelecoms.org.uk/consumer-contracts-regulations.html

Nebulous2

Did you get all your other costs met by Virgin? I think you could be struggling. Normally you have an entitlement to compensation for additional costs through EU legislation, but that does not apply in these extreme circumstances and they could probably get off with refunding the cancelled flight. 

I had a similar situation from New Zealand and signed up with Skype at 15 dollars a month. That does depend on having WiFi however. 

silvercar

jon81uk said:

Legally companies need to provide a customer service number that is an 01,02,03 number so there are no additional costs.
http://www.fairtelecoms.org.uk/consumer-contracts-regulations.html

calling those numbers direct from a mobile from the US could incur those costs!

Westin

Virgin Atlantic have a toll free US telephone number (1-800-365-9500), why did you not use that? 

Using a UK registered phone to call was probably not wise. Using a hotel phone, villa phone or call box and dialling the toll free number would have been best - and free.   If you decided and chose to use your own phone for convenience then I think costs incurred are down to you.

jon81uk

silvercar said:

jon81uk said:

Legally companies need to provide a customer service number that is an 01,02,03 number so there are no additional costs.
http://www.fairtelecoms.org.uk/consumer-contracts-regulations.html

calling those numbers direct from a mobile from the US could incur those costs!

I didn't get from their post that they were in the US at the time. 
In this case then Westin has the best advice, they should have called a US number from a US phone.

There is no harm in asking for the call costs back, but asking for the costs paid to the hotel for calls from there seems more reasonable than from a UK mobile.

It may also be worth checking your travel insurance as they might pay out, but again they may only pay for calls made from the hotel, not a UK mobile.