Robin and Catherine Hackett booked a package holiday through Tui so that stressful details such as the transfer to and from the airport would be organised for them. However, they were left stranded at their hotel on their last morning after the transport failed to turn up. Attempts to get hold of a Tui rep failed and they had to pay for a cab to get to the airport with minutes to spare before check-in closed.
Tui’s response was extraordinary. It said, two months after their complaint, “miscommunication does happen from time to time and customers are not collected”, and that as airport transfers are a third-party contract, Tui “doesn’t have much influence over it”. It refused to reimburse the couple for the €46.25 (£40.66) fare because “nothing has been reported”. The Hacketts had left a message for Tui at the hotel, informed a rep at the airport and lodged a complaint as soon as they reached home.
This was not a one-off case of a customer service slip-up. Weeks earlier Lin Atkinson was pacing her hotel lobby in Turkey when the airport transfer, which was part of her Tui package, failed to show. There was no response from the Tui rep or customer service number so she had to pay €50 for a taxi and reached the airport so late that Tui staff had to fast-track her to the departure gate. Fifty-five days after complaining she received an identical response to the Hacketts; claiming that miscommunications can happen and the fare could not be refunded as “nothing has been reported”.
“Their customer complaints service is a joke. They do not answer the phone, if you manage to get through they can’t find your complaint. They give the same pat phrases in their emails and refuse redress without looking into the case at all,” says Atkinson.
Tui, whose terms and conditions confirm that it is liable for subcontracted elements of a package, refunded the Hacketts and Atkinson only after the Observer got involved. It forgot to mention that the payments could take up to 28 working days to arrive – along with “goodwill” in the form of a £100 voucher towards another Tui trip.
While package deals are supposed to take the hassle out of holidays and offer greater protection when things go wrong, many travellers who do not receive what they paid for are finding themselves stonewalled when they complain. The complaint-handling website Resolver saw a 105% increase in laments about tour operators over the last financial year, with poor customer services the dominant theme.
“We’ve seen a tendency with all online providers to push the blame on to the hotel or travel facility, arguing that they are just ‘the conduit’,” says Resolver’s Martyn James.
Under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018, holiday providers are legally obliged to fix any shortfalls in service provided that they are promptly informed of the problem. Tui, which is the world’s largest travel company, seems to be seizing on this proviso to duck its obligations.
Leanne Hogg and her daughter arrived at their hotel in Cancun, Mexico, to find that a room had not been booked. The hotel demanded a cash payment before it would call Tui’s holiday helpline, which is charged at international rates, so the pair waited four hours in reception until a Tui rep arrived. On her return home, Hogg lodged a complaint and was told that as there was no record that the problem had been reported, she would have to provide proof that she had done so.
Francesca Clarke also was told that her issue had “not been reported” when she complained that she and her young baby had been refused essential assistance during a four-hour delay to a Tui flight. “It is weeks before you hear a response,” she says. “When I did finally receive an reply, the company had not read my email properly and the response was completely unrelated to my complaint. They are making it so hard so you just give up and let them get away with it.”
Tui said: “We’re really sorry to hear about this situation and we will be in contact with the customer to apologise and follow up.” It gave Hogg a £100 voucher after press involvement.
The firm’s insistence that its customers must pay the price if they don’t instantly report service failures does not, it seems, apply the other way around. A month ago, hundreds of passengers who had booked a Cuban Fusion cruise under its brand name Marella learned that their time in Cuba would be slashed by a third after the Havana port authority changed the docking slot. Instead of arriving at 7am and departing at lunchtime the following day, the ship would now dock mid-afternoon shortly before dusk and passengers must be back on board by 11am, leaving insufficient time for many of the advertised excursions.
Tui has declined to say when it was alerted to the new times, but passengers claim the original itinerary was still being marketed after they had been told; others claim they were alerted by social media. Tui, which earlier this year lopped Cuba, the Bahamas and Portugal off a cruise itinerary, says it is in the process of contacting affected passengers and has offered a goodwill gesture – £25 credit to spend on board, upped to £100 after passenger complaints.
Those who have gone off the idea of Cuban Fusion with so little of Cuba about it will have to pay a hefty fee if they want to cancel, because Tui’s terms and conditions, along with those of most other cruise firms, allow it to “deviate, curtail, cancel, postpone and/or terminate” a cruise for “any reason whatsoever” and absolve it from liability if the cause was outside its control.
“This multimillion-pound corporation has nothing but contempt for its customers and thinks that throwing £100 at people and hiding behind the small print is acceptable,” says Mark Gripton, who had booked a cabin with his wife expressly to explore Havana.
Tui has spent millions rebranding itself after dropping its UK name, Thomson, but while custom soars its customer service gets a one-star rating on Trustpilot. The company was fined 48 times during 2015 and 2016 for breaching the code of conduct of the Abta travel trade association. The breaches included inaccurate advertising, tardy responses to complaints and dispatching holidaymakers to building sites.
Rival Thomas Cook was fined 24 times over the same period for failing to deal with complaints and pay compensation on time. One of its customers, Sandra Gibson, is still out of pocket after being denied an essential component of her package holiday in Lanzarote – a flight home. She arrived home 12 hours later than scheduled after her flight was overbooked. She had to pay her own fare to an airport hotel, where the promised room had not been booked, and her luggage failed to make it on to her alternative flight, but seven weeks after claiming compensation she had received no response. Only after press involvement did Thomas Cook pay up.
“We overbook a very small number of seats and only on routes which tend to get no-shows,” says a spokesperson. “As a policy we never select package holiday customers so we are very sorry for this error.”
Package travel regulations allow customers to claim compensation if they did not get what they paid for. But if the company refuses to cooperate, they have go to court, or rely on arbitration provided by one of two industry trade bodies – as long as the firm is a member, since there is no independent travel ombudsman.
