In the past couple of weeks, I have been contacted by several readers who have come home from holidays disappointed with their accommodation or the level of service. This is not unusual at this time of year; but while this correspondence is hardly a representative survey, it seems to me that travellers in such situations are having a harder time than usual obtaining redress. Where one might have expected a tour operator to offer a goodwill payment, or a hotel to reduce a bill slightly, no such generosity has been forthcoming.
There seem to be several reasons for this. First, the economic climate is making tour operators and property owners less inclined to make generous financial gestures. More worried about surviving the recession than winning back custom for another year, they don't want to pay out any money if they can avoid it.
Second, more and more people are making independent booking arrangements through private owners rather than through an agency or operator – and these travellers find it much harder to extract any kind of refund or compensation. An agent or operator can exert pressure on an owner, because the owner relies on them for future bookings. A one-off client has no such leverage.
Lastly, a couple of cases have shown how people's expectations are necessarily subjective. For example, is it reasonable, when you have paid more than £5,000 for a villa in Greece, to expect to be sleeping in cotton, rather than poly-cotton, sheets? Two readers suffered this disappointment – but their case was strengthened by the fact that there was no storage space in the villa (all the cupboards had been locked), and the pool had been treated with the wrong sort of paint (so that the children ended up with blue arms and legs for much of the holiday).
Labels: HOLIDAY
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