Travel Trolley / Southall Travel - Scam or just an awful company?

nottRobin

We’ve spent about 15 hours on the phone to Travel Trolley (Wikipedia says they’re the “online division” of Southall Travel) over the past 9 days, we’ve paid nearly £6k (double what we should have) and we still haven’t got any tickets.

I still can’t quite work out if we’ve been scammed, or they’re just an incredibly incompetent and dishonest company. Here’s what happened so far:

On December 21st, we were looking for flights from London to Singapore for our family on SkyScanner. We saw “travel trolley” were an official partner of SkyScanner or something, so we thought they’d be trustworthy. We went through to their website and tried to pay with 2 different credit cards, but both failed.

So we called them up to see if we could pay over the phone. We were speaking to someone called “Anna”, who also called us back on a different number at one point. We tried to pay with the same credit cards, and then also with a debit card, but they all failed. During this time she asked us for OTPs over the phone, which sounded a bit dodgy, but we went with it.

After it all failed (it’s now the next day, 22nd, it took that long), we agreed to do a bank transfer instead. We were a bit worried, but the account details she gave us were verified through our HSBC app as belonging to the “Southall Travel” business account, so we were reassured by that. So we transferred £2767. We didn’t get any email confirmation of any kind, so we called her back and she said we’d get it tomorrow.

The next day (23rd December), we called up and someone else answered who wasn’t Anna (I guess she was off that day). After a lot of back and forth, they emailed us an eticket that was missing my wife and had my name completely wrong. We called up again later in the day and this time were told that Travel Trolley didn’t have our tickets because they were with a “third party” called “Travel trolley trips”. In fact, the Travel Trolley website does say in small print at the bottom “we send all email communication, e-tickets etc from official @traveltrolley.co.uk email addresses”, and our etickets were sent from traveltrolleytrips@gmail.com. Uh oh.

On December 26th, we managed to get through to Anna who said that she did work for Travel Trolley, but only she could access our booking for some reason. She forwarded us the etickets with the correct names. However (we found out later) Malaysian Airlines has no knowledge of these tickets, and told us that the eticket number on them was actually for an Emirates flight, even though the itinerary was definitely all for Malaysian Airlines flights.

The next day, December 27th, Anna called up and told us that she couldn’t issue our tickets because our money was being held as suspicious by their bank. They asked us for a bunch of ID documents so they could prove the transaction was genuine, which we sent. But it didn’t help. Then Anna said we had to pay again before the money could be unlocked. As soon as we paid again, the first payment would apparently be refunded to us. She passed us over to “Jenny” in their finance department (who sounds a lot like Anna). We told Jenny that there was no way that we were paying again, they sounded a lot like scammers at this point.

We then called various people. We called the Barclays fraud department (Barclays are Southall Travel’s bank, although Jenny refused to tell us that - we had to get it from looking up the sort code) who said that yes they do sometimes hold money in suspicious payments to *personal accounts* but it should never happen to a business account. We called our bank who were only able to confirm that the money had definitely been sent on the 22nd without any incident.

So. They had our money and we weren’t sure whether to trust them at all, but we wanted either our money back or tickets. So we decided to pay them from a credit card, so we could dispute and reclaim the payment if we needed to. We gave them the credit card details over the phone, but they took £300 more than the amount we’d previously agreed, without telling us. Super dodgy. They told us the money would be back in our account within 48 hours.

Well, 48 hours was about 10:30am this morning, and guess what, it’s not there. We also haven’t been given any new etickets.

Looking into it, we now find that there are tons of recent 1* TrustPilot reviews detailing similar experiences, and a moneysavingexpert thread about something sounding eerily similar. There’s also a news story about a scam with Southall Travel.

We’ve now told Anna that we will complain to SkyScanner, to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and file a court claim to retrieve the money if we don’t have tickets and refund by 10am tomorrow. I suppose we’ll see what happens.

As I say, I still don’t know if we’ve been scammed or not. It’s quite clear that we initially transferred the money to Southall Travel, so that should be a legitimate business transaction. It seems definite that “Anna” represents that company. She might be defrauding Southall Travel herself, similarly to what’s described in the MSE thread, but if that’s the case surely the company still owe us tickets or refund, and it’s then their business what they want to do with Anna.

Anyone have experience like this? What do you think we should do?

MikeJXE

Have you looked at trust pilot reviews ?

gorgeousme

I do hope they are legit. By the way, have you checked your credit/debit cards? Make sure no payment has been taken from them! 

I have booked to go to Singapore too, I also used Skyscanner, but I chose to buy the tickets with Singapore Airlines direct. Our tickets were emailed to us immediately so they have no excuse to keep you waiting. Keep us updated with any progress.

nottRobin

MikeJXE said:

Have you looked at trust pilot reviews ?

Yes, as I mentioned, we only now realised they have loads of recent 1* reviews that sound very similar to our experience.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/traveltrolley.co.uk

Caz3121

I think you will find the poor reviews go back many years (Air Travel forum on TripAdvisor has threads going back 9 years+) also worth a read here - https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/traveltrolley
bank transfer request is a huge red flag
SkyScanner don't endorse any of the third parties that pay to appear on their search results (in the same way a newspaper would not be endorsing any paid adverts)
wish you all the best getting your money back. Best to look to book direct with the airline in the future or with a reputable travel agent. There are many poor third parties around that are best avoided

Westin

I am really not sure if you have been ‘scammed’ or just in an unfortunate position.

Southhall Travel is a large established seller of both flights but also protected package holidays. Travel Trolley is one of their trading brands.

There are many points within your story that could well be feasible and just unfortunate occurrences which given the time of year may cause bigger issues. Large payments to one off suppliers may flag up warnings by credit card companies.  Making a bank transfer over the Christmas holidays may lead to delays in transfers/receipt. Staff taking time off may lead to talking with others or delays in processing certain things etc.

The red flag to me would be the sudden use of the traveltrolleytrips@gmail email address. That don’t sound right. I would be surprised that a registered business the size of Southall Travel would use a gmail email address.

Glad that you reported the matter to Barclay’s to investigate. They should be able to tell you if the bank details used are for Southall/Travel Trolley or another, such as a personal account.

Perhaps try to contact Southall’s customer service people to check more.  Unfortunately the timing (New Year) is not great. Good luck.

Westin

Just noticed this at the bottom of the front page of the Travel Trolley website 

https://www.traveltrolley.co.uk/

“ Payment Information
● Our bank Account Number is 63245268 and Sort Code 204281. If you are making a bank payment with Travel Trolley, please ensure you use these account details. 

● We send all email communication, e-tickets etc from official @traveltrolley.co.uk email addresses”

nk8

I'm afraid we've just come to this forum to complain about them and was just doing a search to see how many others have complained about them previously. They basically have a pattern of refusing to allow passengers to redeem travel vouchers issued during Covid times it seems. 

Westin

nk8 said:

I'm afraid we've just come to this forum to complain about them and was just doing a search to see how many others have complained about them previously. They basically have a pattern of refusing to allow passengers to redeem travel vouchers issued during Covid times it seems. 

This however was not the case in this OP’s situation.

I see that you started your own thread with your particular issue. Wise to do so that things don’t get muddled.

Westin

@nottRobin - Have you resolved yet? 

Westin

Presumably this all worked out fine and @nottRobin received their flight tickets from Southall Travel/Travel Trolley.