I booked a holiday to Turkey for me, my partner and her daughter with Love Holidays. It was in June this year for seven nights, 10 to 17 June, and cost £2,261.
Four days into the holiday, I received an email from out of the blue from Love Holidays with an offer to extend the trip and fly back instead on 27 June.
I replied, ‘OK, thank u’ – meaning I’d received the offer and would consider it.
The email said I must reply in 48 hours to take up the offer, so when I decided not to I simply didn’t reply.
But later that day, Love Holidays emailed again confirming that our return flights had been moved from 17 June to 27 June.
Turkish trip: This family were enjoying a long-awaited holiday, but it ended in disaster
The email again asked me to confirm the changes within 48 hours, and said that if I didn’t, no changes would be made. I replied ‘No thank u’ and thought I’d still be booked on the original flight.
However, Love Holidays had indeed made the change to the flight dates, and when we got to Antalya airport, we were no longer booked on our flight.
This was a source of much distress, especially as my partner’s daughter is autistic and was extremely anxious about being stranded in Turkey with nowhere to sleep.
In the end, we managed to book seats on our original outbound flight – but at an extra cost of £715.05. Can you help? C.K, Essex
Helen Crane, This is Money’s consumer champion, replies: This was a much-needed holiday for your family, and I’m sorry things went so awry.
You told me it was your first holiday abroad in 10 years, and you’d saved hard to be able to afford it. When you had to fork out the extra £715 to get home, you needed to borrow it from your father-in-law.
Some would say your ‘OK, thank u’ response to LoveHolidays’ email amounted to you accepting its offer to move your flights back by ten days.
It is certainly open to interpretation. However, I would question why LoveHolidays is emailing customers in the middle of their break asking them to move their flights.
Either the flights had been over booked – which seems unlikely as you were able to book a last-minute ticket – or the firm was simply trying to get more money out of you.
As a package holiday company, it would be quids in had you spent an extra ten nights in your hotel.
But its first email didn’t mention anything about the hotel arrangements. Nor were you at any point asked for any extra money to cover the additional nights.
If LoveHolidays really thought you’d agreed to extend your holiday by ten days, surely it would have asked for payment?
Hotel arrangements were only mentioned in its second email, to which you clearly replied ‘No thank u’ to decline.
So confident were you that you were returning home on 17 June, that you even emailed LoveHolidays to confirm your transfer back to the airport the day before – though this didn’t receive a reply. You were still booked on the coach, however.
Your stomach must have dropped when you turned up at the airport to be told your names weren’t down to board your flight.
This was all the more challenging for you as your partner’s daughter is autistic, and found the panicked rush to secure a way home very unsettling.
Yes, the email you sent was ambiguous. However, in my opinion, Love Holidays shouldn’t change people’s booking details while they’re already on holiday, on the strength of a three-word message where the meaning is unclear.
It would surely have been easy to call you and check.
You also didn’t respond to requests to confirm the changes within 48 hours, which should have seen them cancelled according to the wording of the email.
On this basis, I contacted Love Holidays to ask if it would make things right.
I’m pleased to say it agreed to refund you for the £715.05 cost of your additional return flight, after accepting that there had been an ‘agent error’ and your email shouldn’t have given it the go-ahead to rebook your flights.
It also gave you a £250 voucher to put towards another holiday.
A spokesperson said: ‘We’re very sorry that [C.K’s] recent experience fell short of our usual high standards.
‘We have refunded him the cost of his return flight home and have offered him a £250 voucher as a gesture of goodwill. We are reviewing our internal processes to ensure this doesn’t happen again.’
I hope the money puts you a little closer to your next well-earned break.
