| Product: |
octopustravel.com |
| Date: |
22/04/02 (510 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Great price range, Easy to use
Disadvantages: Cancellation fees
My gripe with Octupustravel is the cancellation fee I was charged. I am a frequent user of online travel booking facilities - from flights to hotels - and was completely let down by their service. But first I'll quickly introduce you to what Octopus travel is: it's an online flight & hotel booking engine. It's UK based and works like all other online booking engines - you enter the dates you are looking for and it supplies you with a number of different flight/hotels that are available. It all sounds grand until you decide to cancel!
2-3 days after making my hotel booking through Octopustravel I needed to cancel it as I had decided not to travel. I was cancelling a month before the arrival date and so assumed no cancellation fee would be applicable. How wrong I was! There it was in black&white in the Booking Terms that I had to pay £20 sterling (?35). I accept that it states it in the Booking Terms that a cancellation fee is payable, but just who actually reads them? But more importantly however, I was amazed and disappointed to realise that I was charged this cancellation fee even when Octopustravel had not in fact made the booking with the hotel in question. I contacted the hotel directly only to hear that a reservation had not yet been made in my name and was not likely to be made until approximately 2 weeks before my arrival date. Therefore I was charged a cancellation fee for a booking that Octopustravel does not actually have to cancel!
There is absolutely no way you can justify a charge of £20 sterling for removing a booking from an automated system. In fact this practice does not seem to me to be very ethical - Octopustravel basically charged me to do something that they do not actually have to do. I emailed to complain about this so I'll fill you in if I get any kind of genuine response.
Summary:
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Last comments:
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- 25/04/02 Octopustravel rang me today to respond to my complaint. The phone call did not start off very well as the person I was talking to me did not seem to be understanding my point of view AT all. I kept repeating my reason for thinking the cancellation fee was unfair, even if allowable because of their Booking Terms, as he didn't seem to understand what I was trying to say, but he just kept explaining in technical jargon why I was charged. In the end I could not even understand what he was explaining - it was like he was trying to get me to agree with him by confusing me!
So I just waited patiently for him to finish so I could just say "Thanks for getting back to me" and get him off the line, when he suddenly did a very quick turn around and offered me a full refund as a goodwill gesture! I was gob smacked. If I'd been giving him a very hard time of it I would have understood, but I was so lost in the jargon that I was only agreeing with him. He changed his mind when he saw on his records that I had cancelled within 4 days of making the booking - he simply said this was unusual and offered the refund. I was so shell shocked so I just meekly said thank you. So it is worth airing your complaint if you truly feel wrong done by! Cheers Octopustravel! |
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- 23/04/02 Quiet frankly, this is the standard response I assume I'll get from Octopustravel. We all know that companies do not, as a rule, do anything against the rules and therefore can always hide behind the all encompassing get-out clause of 'The rules state....'. What I wrote here to complain about is the fact that it was unfair/unethical/immoral (whichever your preference is) to charge fees to NOT make a booking in my name. If they block-book rooms in the company's name then that makes it even more obvious that they were not going to be penalised for me canceling my booking -the hotel would never have known I even made it! This isn't good customer service at all. I know I'll get a response similar to your comment from Octopustravel so I don't need to get it here too. |
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- 23/04/02 Quite frankly, if you didn't read the booking conditions before handing over payment then you really don't have a case to make against them. Although there was no booking in your name at the hotel, octooustravel.com have an allocation of a certain number of rooms at the hotel and so the hotel did not see a room reserved for you but a block booking of X number of rooms for octopustravel.com (regardless of the names of the guests using the rooms).
In the travel industry £20.00 is normal for a cancellation fee. There are some agencies that charge 100% cancellation fees if anything is cancelled within 28 days of travel.
The fact that you cancelled a month beforehand does not affect the cancellation fee - it would have been the same if you had cancelled six months beforehand. The fact is that you agreed to a transaction and then changed your mind. |
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