Thomson Have Ruined My 50TH !!!

babyaki

:mad: :mad: :mad: We booked to go to Goa staying at The Holiday Inn on Mobor Beach on 17 May 2007, flying on 5 Jan 2008 for two weeks. This was to celebrate my 50th Birthday and as we stayed in the same hotel last year, we booked again as we liked it so much and had arranged with other guests to meet up for my birthday. On 20th December, (after we had received all our tickets etc!) we received a letter from Thomson saying that The Holiday Inn had "an overbooking situation at the accommodation, which means they are unable to fulfil your holiday". They offered us a place about 6 miles away on a completley different beach, The Country Inn Suites in Varca. They gave us a link to their page on the website, where we could find full details. The page had ONE picture of the hotel and that was a bedroom. The "Full Details" consisted of " Has a swimming pool" and that was about it. I tried the Holiday forums to see if I could find out any more details, ( Holiday Truths Trip Advisor etc.) but there wasn't a single reference to The Country Inn Suites in Varca, which started the alarm bells ringing as it was obviously a new build as it had no reports on it. We searched for another hotel in South Goa, but as it was so close to the holiday, there was no availability. When we contacted Thomson to register our annoyance at having lost our holiday after booking it 7 months ago, we were told that there was nothing we could do about it and if we didn't like the alternative, we could just have a refund of our money. We told them that we had originally booked three other members in our party, but because of exam commitments we had to cancel them at a loss of £450.00 deposits we had paid. They told us that we couldn't have the £450.00 returned as the holiday hadn't been cancelled when we cancelled the three bookings! I argued that they had lost no monies themselves as they had not booked the rooms, but they wouldnt move on it.
We have now booked to go to Jamaica and it's cost us a further £600.00 to arrange this. Surely they should give us the £450.00 and refund the extra we've had to pay to make sure we have the Birthday holiday that we've had to book at such short notice. We paid for the holiday with credit cards and are thinking about contacting them over the situation. Anyone had a similar experience or can give some advice on this? Cheers!

Incapuppy

No advice to offer but I just wanted to say that I am sorry that your special birthday plans have been ruined. I hope you have a lovely time in Jamaica.

stan747

i would put a complaint in writing with all the details and dates and address it to someone up the chain, you may get something back as a goodwil gesture. btw, enjoy your holiday.

zorber

Did you have any form of holiday insurance which will offer insurance against cancellation.

Certainly try your credit card as they are creditors and if you didnt get the product (your holiday) you maybe able to claim back from them.

Alternatively try sueing but not sure how far you would get!!

Sorry to hear of your issue.

magyar

I can't really see that Thompson have any responsibility to pay for the cancellation fee for people who wouldn't have been able to go anyway.

I think it's not unreasonable to expect Thompson to meet the additional costs of an equivalent holiday in a different location - provided of course that this WAS an equivalent - but it's very, very hard to prove, because you'd have to demonstrate that seven months ago, that same holiday would have been £600 cheaper.

In practice there's not much you can do here. As Stan747 above says, your best bet is to try and get some goodwill gesture from them.