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“Had a rotten experience with Airtours/Mytravel in...”

written by Dore on 26/10/2006

Good Points
Cheapish, but in a market of cheapish operators that try harder - that's about it really.

Bad Points
For skiing - crazy policy of pushing all flights through Grenoble.
Making your coach wait many hours to pick up from other flights, therefore no actual choice in arrival time.
Didn't seem to care in response to my complaint.

General Comments
Had a rotten experience with Airtours/Mytravel in January on a ski trip. I wrote to them to complain and got a "not interested" response and no compensation. My letter is below:



Dear sir/madam



I booked my Airtours holiday to Maeva Les Melezes apartments in Alpe d'Huez through Igluski.com departing on 31 December. I have just returned from this holiday. Airtours did as much as they could possibly do to squeeze the enjoyment out of the trip. My biggest complaint is with the practice of filling coaches to resorts with passengers from several flights, hours apart.



I booked on the 5:30am flight from Gatwick to Grenoble. After I made the booking, you changed the flight time to 5.00am. I booked the early flight as it gave me the opportunity for an afternoon of skiing, as I knew from previous visits that Alpe D'Huez was only about 2 hours from Grenoble, and your website quotes the transfer time as 2 hours and 30 minutes. My journey to the resort is as follows:



1:30am Wake up

2am Get cab to airport (cheaper trains would have been an option if I'd taken the 9:20 flight).

3am Arrive at airport to check-in.

5am Fly to Grenoble.

7:20am arrive at Grenoble airport. Wait for passengers off the other flights, including the 9:20 flight (that was delayed and arrived at 9:35).

11:15am Leave Grenoble airport, just under 4 hours after arriving.

13:30pm Arrive at apartment to find the reception shut at midday and wouldn't re-open until 5pm.

13:30pm to 5pm Wait in unheated reception area as there was nobody there to tell us if there was somewhere safe we could leave our ski gear or somewhere warm to wait.

5:15pm, get into our apartment room.



From door to door this was over 13 hours. Crucially, we missed the clear opportunity to ski in the afternoon of the first day. I am seriously concerned with your policy of getting passengers to wait for other flights to arrive over 2 hours after their own flight lands. Passengers on a bus to one resort who arrived on my plane were waiting for just four passengers off the 9:20 flight.



Needless to say, this problem was repeated at the other end. I was picked up from my apartment at 4:15 along with people on flights much later in the morning. These people had to suffer the horrors of Grenoble airport for several hours. This airport would cope well if it wasn't full of your passengers sitting around waiting for flights several hours later. As it was, people trying to get to check-in desks found it almost impossible to move through the crowds of Airtours passengers filling the floor space with nowhere to go.



When you look at this from the point of view of a customer, none of it makes any sense. If you are trying to give customers a choice of flights then I can assure you, customers would be far happier with less choice and less waiting around at the other end. It also doesn't make any sense when I looked at the list of resorts you serve from Grenoble. Some of these would have been far better served from Geneva, Chambery or even Lyon. The only two resorts I could see on the list for which Grenoble flights made any sense were Alpe d'Huez and Les Deux Alpes.



Skiing/boarding are very expensive holiday activities and customers want to make the very most of the opportunity. I had reasonably expected to get 6.5 days of skiing out of this trip. That's why I chose this resort. I was utterly stunned that you couldn't get me to the resort after a 5am flight in time to get half a day of skiing done on the Saturday. I've skied with other companies before and never experienced this approach. I've enjoyed summer package holidays with Airtours before and not experienced this problem. So I can't understand why you think this is an acceptable way to manage ski trips.



A smaller annoyance is that I had to call the rep on Friday evening to find out what time the return pick up time was. He assured me he was going to come to my apartment next to let me know the time of the transfer. He must have known much earlier in the week what time it was, but probably didn't want his customers on later flights to spend the week complaining to him about the early transfer. I shouldn't have to spend my own money calling the rep so late in the holiday to find out information that could be in the welcome pack.



So what would I like you to do?



1) For your own sake I think you should take a long look at the policy of putting several flights into individual buses. Every passenger on my bus was given a major source of frustration at either the outward or the return transfer. This cannot be good for customer retention or the image of Airtours in general.



2) You should compensate my party of four. Typically, self catering ski holidays cost me around £600 all in. I was quite reasonably expecting 6.5 days of skiing out of this and only got 6 days. Since the whole point of this trip was to go skiing I value my time according to the amount of skiing available. Half a day of skiing is therefore quite an expensive block of time for us all to lose. Based on the above figures, I calculate this to be £46.15 per person. We also spent all of a Saturday afternoon guarding our bags in a cold apartment lobby. I value my weekends highly and would never choose to sit in an unheated room for so long. I can't easily put a figure on this, but suspect it would more than cover any flight supplements that later flights might incur. I incurred the further expense of having to get a taxi to the airport that I wouldn't have needed if I'd known the 9:20 flight would have got me to the resort at the same time. The taxi was £55 and the train fares would have been £5.40 each using our Network Railcards. We therefore each need a further £8.75. Finally, I had to spend approximately £4 of my own money phoning your reps mobile to find out what time the return transfer was. This equates to over £50 per person to compensate for our costs and time, although the annoyance and frustration caused by your policies feels like it has cost us significantly more than this.



3) You should get someone senior to look at the sheet of paper that your reps hand out at Grenoble explaining the reason why customers will be held at the airport for several hours. This contained several glaring grammatical errors, and further annoyed customers by patronisingly telling them what a good opportunity they now had to spend their time reading the welcome pack and enjoying the amenities of Grenoble airport. We would all have happily read the welcome pack on the coach and enjoyed the amenities of Alpe d'Huez rather than Grenoble Airport!



I trust you will take these concerns seriously, and I eagerly await your views and actions.



Yours faithfully,