Shame about the Reps - updated 5/3/02 (Thomson Holidays)

Member Name: SachaG

Product:	Thomson Holidays
Date:	02/03/02 (526 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: excellent prices, brochure accuracy, wide choice of resorts

Disadvantages: Unhelpful reps when you could find them

After booking a skiing holiday from the Thomson 2001/2002 ski brochure I was looking forward to my holiday. The Thomson brochure price was excellent when compared to other ski operators and was a true reflection of the hotel and resort. I found the website extremely useful as well as it had pictures of the hotel restuarant, bedrooms and bar area for you to see.

The only area that let Thomson down as their in resort reps. It was our groups feeling that the reps who visited the hotel had no real interest in the guests staying or were willing to make any effort to help us with any queries. Instead when we did see them, they were happy to laugh and joke together and made themselves as unapproachable as possible. I thought it usual for a welcome meeting to take place, if there was one we were not informed of it.

On my last evening I slipped on some untreated steps near the hotel, breaking my arm and causing a great deal of pain. The rep we managed to contact offered no help whatsoever, apart from to say ‘ask the hotel staff for help’. Yes it was a Saturday night and I am sure the rep’s had better things to do than us help me deal with and understand an Italian hospital, but the conversation left me cold.

Sunday morning we made ourselves ready at 7.15am for transport to the airport, we were meet by a rep and the coach left the hotel at 7.15. We then took a 30 minute drive to the next village in heavy snow and picked up a further 2 passengers, the coach then doubled back on itself passing back passed the hotel we were picked up from nearly an hour after we had left it. It then stopped about 200 meters further up the road and a further 4 people boarded.

As I am sure you will appreciate we were left somewhat confused as to why we had been on an hours coach ride to arrive back where we started. I therefore call the rep over and asked her why. The reply was ‘Another rep messed up the pick up plan’, o
n my attempted to respond to this I was told ‘if you would be quiet and let me finish’. She them went on to say that they realised on Friday the pick up plan was wrong, but did not do anything about it. I told her how unhappy I was with this, as they had 2 days to re-inform the people staying in the hotel that their pick up could be an hour later, or she could at least of let us know when we boarded the coach what was happening. Her last words were ‘I could have just lied to you about why you’ve been on the coach on hour already’; she seemed to think she should receive praise for not lying to me?

At no point was an apology offered or any further reference to the other passengers who were all complaining amongst themselves made.

Upon reaching the airport after a 1.45 transfer turn into a 3-hour transfer, we were requested to remain on the coach until she had checked our check-in desk numbers. We were told A11 and A12, and she would be around to make sure everything was ok. Well it wasn’t, and could we find any reps, no. A11 was marked for Bristol and had about 30 people in it already after queuing for some 20 minutes and sign changed to Dublin? The people from our coach around 18 people then swapped to A12 still marked Bristol and waited in line behind about 30 people already in the queue. After a further 10 minutes we heard a call for out flight now boarding, the group were all concerned by this as the queue we were now in did not seem to be moving either. On checking with airport staff it turned out that all the people in front of us in the Bristol A12 queue were in fact waiting for A12 to change to Dublin.

The result of this was that we very nearly missed our flight and throughout there was not a single Rep to be found.

Summary: