If anyone was looking for a tour operator to go skiing with, I would like to give you all the details of my experience. I have only just got back but I am incensed enough to feel the need to put something down in writing now, so that anyone who is looking forward to a week with Skibeat will know which characters to look out for.<br><br>The short version is this; arrived 9.00am Gatwick for a 11.25 Titan flight to Chambery, with the ultimate aim of arriving in Plan Peisey by early tea-time. Smiley lady on check in says flight on time. Really? Err, no, but only a little bit late. Info boards say flight on time. As departure time comes and goes, departure boards say flight delayed by an hour. This goes on till 3pm. Next time I check, the boards say 'gate closing.' We gather up the piles of crap that 10 adults and 5 toddlers managed to spread around the departure hall floor after 6 hours in the airport and rush to the boarding gate, only to find there is no boarding going on. We mill around, spread our crap about again, try and explain to 2 year old that the plane can't fly and it isn't like Bob the Builder and we can't just 'fix it.' One year olds all just sit there and cry with exhaustion. Noone tells us anything. Noone has told us anything for hours now, not since the smiley check in lady told us everything was on time. And believe me, we have been asking for information. <br><br>5.30pm, the flight is announced as cancelled for that day. Accommodation will be provided at Crawley Arora. We should collect our bags and wait for the bus. Nothing else happens for over an hour. More milling around, more not being told anything. We call Skibeat, but they have an answerphone on telling us to call back on Monday morning. It is beginning to dawn on us that although we have booked a package holiday in order to have a tour operator smooth out any little problems so that a holiday with 5 toddlers is not hell, we are entirely on our own. An hour later and we have finally got out bags bag and look for someone to tell us where the promised bus to the hotel is. On closer examination, there is noone there to offer help or give info, so we catch a taxi to the hotel. Hotel is very good and well organised, even though apparently their first guests turned up by taxi before the airline had told the hotel to expect them! We are given no info as to what time to return to the airport in the morning. Friend logs onto her Blackberry and finds out we must be there at 8am. <br><br>Gatwick, day 2. Smiley check in lady tells us we will definitely be flying to France today. Err, can you be specific about where in France, exactly? No, but we will definitely be on our holiday by the end of the day. Of course, she was wrong on both accounts. We did not fly to France, and nor were we on our holiday by the end of the day. By the end of Sunday we were in Italy. More of that later.<br><br>Off we go to the departure hall again. 2 year old is asking where the aeroplane is. No updates are made on the information board, right until someone notices the flight is announced as closing again. We hastily pack up the toddlers again.<br><br>At this point, my computer has kindly deleted the second half of my post as I tried to correct a spelling mistake. I am too zonked to re-type it all in detail. So please bear with the shorter version. There may be some stronger language used to get across the strength of feeling in fewer words.<br><br>We are informed as we get on the plane that we are going to MILAN! Nowhere near Plan Peisey. But don’t worry, Ski beat are sending a bus to Milan to get us. In the meantime a friend of ours has managed to get to the airport, take off with another TO and airline, arrive on time, and is in La Rosiere having a pint.<br><br>We arrive at Milan at 3.30pm. After what seems like an age waiting for our bags (we are relieved all of our bags arrive,) we leave the baggage hall, passing reps with placards for Crystal, Ski Esprit, Total Ski, and some others I can’t remember. They are calling over their holiday makers and directing them to their buses. There is a noticeable absence of Ski Beat reps. There is a man in the airport who is on holiday but who once worked for Ski Beat. He tells us to sit tight, they are coming for us. The Titan bus rep tells us to get on the bus to Chambery or we will be stranded in Milan. We take a leap of faith and stay in Milan. <br><br>4 hours later a bus arrives with 2 Ski Beat reps on it. One tells us to wait where we are. Then we get a patronizing phone call 20 mins later from the same rep saying they are waiting on the bus for us, are we lost? We wake up our exhausted sleeping children and make our way to the bus. There is a different rep there, talking on the phone. We wait for him to finish his conversation and ask which bus we should be on. He tells us our bus is not here yet and to go and sit down. I tell him (over the sounds of several wailing toddlers) that we have been on the go for nearly 36 hours with no info at all – why can his company not give us any useful information, not even where the bus is? He yells at me that he is having a difficult day. I politely tell him to get over it and do the job he is paid for. He tells us to wait for 20 mins more for the bus and slinks off to sulk. We do not see him for another 2 hours, when the bus finally appears. It is a good job as we would probably have eaten him if he had stayed within eyesight of us. <br><br>At 9.30pm, 6 hours after arriving in Milan, we leave. The bus is filthy and full of rubbish, the driver is obviously knackered and veering across the road. He is asked several times to stop texting on his phone. The rep tells us the journey will be 4 hours. After 4 hours we ask for a wee break. We are still in Italy. The rep refuses to talk to us, as he is not the rep for our resort. His name is Phil, I believe he is the La Plagne rep. He is a rude arrogant tosser who was lucky not to have been shoved face first out of the bus onto the side of the road. Around 1am the driver turns the air con down to Baltic temperatures and switches the radio on full blast to try and keep him awake. He has driven alone without a break for over 12 hours. You can’t blame him, but we didn’t want to be on a bus with him. We make a detour to get a new driver.<br><br>Eventually, at 3.30am we arrive in Plan Peisey. Noone has even put the kettle on in the chalet. You’d think they weren’t expecting us. We go to bed having failed to get a time that the resort manager will be round to hear our complaints in the morning.<br><br>The next day the resort managers come to our chalet. Their names are Garry and Terry Elcock. Garry is an older man full of his own self-importance, and bullsh!t. He tells us all of the airports in France have been closed all day. I ask if this is true, or are there other factors, as we have been told nothing for 48 hours now, and are starting our holiday exhausted, fractious and feeling like we are on holiday with a company who couldn’t organize a p!ss up in a brewery. He explodes and tells us he is having a really hard time. One of our group raises her voice to be heard above him, and tells him she is not interested in his hard time, but would like it if someone, anyone, from Ski Beat would listen to us. He stands up and shouts ‘NO. YOU LISTEN TO ME!’ We are flabbergasted. We have only met 3 Ski Beat employees in 48 hours, and one has patronized us and 2 have yelled at us. The woman who asked him to listen walks out. I raise my voice even more to be heard above his shouting and tell him to listen to us. He tells us he doesn not have to listen to this and storms off. He returns after Terry tells him and us to calm down.<br><br>We ask for explanations and compensation. We are refused both. Garry will not talk about the airports after I reveal I am an airline pilot with 10 years experience flying to the Alps and that I think he is bullsh!tting and that there is more to it. I point out that I know other operators were getting their guests to their holidays and think there is a certain level of Ski Beat incompetence involved. Garry turns to telling us how difficult it is for such a small company to catch up when there is disruption. The woman in our group he yelled at earlier is not fobbed off with this excuse and tells him she is a ‘continuity manager’ for a major company and here day-to-day work involves making sure that disruptions don’t disrupt things, as it were. We are offered no further explanations for anything at all after this. Our requests for compensation are refused.<br><br>We later discover that along with the flight that sat on the ground in Lyons for 7 hours without letting passengers of before returning to Gatwick, our bus load of holiday makers has become the talk of the resort – ‘have you heard about the people who set off on Saturday morning and didn’t get here till Monday?’ kind of thing. We also heard that other tour operators had offered their clients a partial refund, no questions asked.<br><br>We had booked with a tour operator rather than a DIY holiday because we wanted to have someone else do the legwork wrt to tricky bits of a holiday. We had a 2 year old and 4 one year olds in our party, and travelling for 45 hours with no real end in sight, no information and no explanations was one of the hardest things I have done as a parent.<br><br>Plan Peisey was great, the chalet was OK, but nothing will take away from my memory the fact that this was the least well organized holiday I have ever been on, that we arrived nearly 2 days late. Ski Beat management were nothing but a complete shower of unpleasant and aggressive incompetence, and I can do nothing at all to recommend them. I am sorry if you are booked to go with them later in the year. I would not go on holiday again with them if you paid me. <br><br>Oh, and they had the second most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. <br><br>There you go – that’s the short version. I know there will be someone else along to give their version soon!