All in all, a reliable, smooth operating travel agent (First Choice)

Member Name: gayle04

Product:	First Choice
Date:	28/01/09 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: legroom, entertainment, easy to book, no hiccups

Disadvantages: food on flight, entertainment upgrade a bit of a con

I am surprised to see that first choice have such a bad overall rating as we had very few problems with them when we booked a package holiday to the maldives through their website. As far as the actual booking was concerned, we had no issues at all. We found our holiday, "added it to the basket" and we were set up with an account which we could go into whenever we wanted to make payments towards the holiday. We never had any issue with this and throughout the process, we never had to contact an actual person at first choice at all.

The tickets arrived in plenty of time and the next experience of first choice was at the airport. Check in was quick, we had pre-booked seats together so there was no problem there. I was aware however, of other couples who had not pre-booked seats complaining as they were going to be seperated. If it had been me, I would have been pretty angry too but on the other hand you have to see it from first choice's point of view and there are only so many seats on a plane. If you don't pre-book and you don't get there really early, you aren't guaranteed seats together.

The plane was really good, plenty of legroom compared to other flights I have been on. There was a tv screen in the back of the seat infront and you could play games on it, watch films or watch episodes of Tv programmes. One niggle was that you had to pay £5 to upgrade your entertainment so that you could be in control of when you watched the film and you could get extra games etc. It isn't a huge amount of money but I felt they went about it quite sneakily as they advertised the upgraded entertainment by showing clips of films which were actually going to be on on the flight home. You had to pay £5 each way for the upgrade so there were people who bought it for a particular film, only to find out that actually, that was on on the way back and they would have to buy it all over again. It was basically false advertising but to be fair, they did give refunds to those people (although it took a bit of persuasion!).

We were given a little package with a blanket in, a pillow, toothbrush, fluffy socks and an eye mask thing which was a nice touch although the blanket could have been bigger! The food we were given on the flight was the same as most flight meals - disgusting. I hardly ate any of it, but it is always a bit of a laugh to see how much of the meal is actually edible.

When we arrived at our destination we were shown exactly what to do and where to go and the same was true on the journey back. It was a smooth booking process, smooth flight and smooth arrival - no problems at all so I can't really fault first choice.

Summary: I would definitely use first choice again to book a holiday with.