To feel robbed by love holidays

[Chloefairydust]

So in May me and my partner booked a holiday with love holidays, regrettably. Their customer service is non existent. They cancelled our flights after we had already paid for them, and never rebooked flights. We couldn’t contact them to reorganise our flights, so we ended up having to organise our own flights thinking we could get a partial refund on the holiday as obviously they never organised our flights. However there’s no way of getting in touch with them and they basically owe us £1400 . I have come to accept I’m never going to see that money again. Just wondering if anyone else has had the same experience?

+44 208 175 1145 pretty sure this is their number.
I've booked plenty of times through them and they've been brilliant and as said upthread they are atol protected. Unfortunate about your experience.

I had a holiday booked with them in 2020 that had to be cancelled for obvious reason. I got my refund using the online system, though if memory serves correctly I think they charged me an admin fee of £40 or so. I decided I was happy to pay that for an easy life rather than trying to get hold of someone on the phone.

Can you still log in and see your booking? Are there any options to request refunds there? I guess maybe not if you’ve already actually been on the holiday.

Apply to trading standards. Screenshot the page. Set up Twitter account. Post screenshot on Twitter along with a description of your complaint. Keep retweeting it, tag in Anna Tims, iata, trading standards, MPs, TV shows, citizens advice, whoever you can think of. Tag as many as you can. It will work!
There is no customer services anywhere any more, only shaming on social media. Good luck.

Get in touch via their Twitter page - usually companies don’t want bad publicity and want to be seen to respond. They are active on Twitter and respond there to complaints.

Part of your problem is that you still used part of the package - it would have been better if you considered the contract entirely null and void as soon as the flights were cancelled, then organised a trip entirely separately.
Getting a refund for the whole sum is far easier than having to negotiate what portion the flights were.

Their small print of ‘no refunds’ contravenes the Sale of Goods and Services Act / Consumer Rights Act and is effectively a load of rubbish. You are entitled to receive a refund for a service not provided.

Try Twitter. It’s going to prove difficult with your bank because it’s not a full, but partial refund.

You should know which airline it was originally since it shows you when you are booking.
I had holidays booked with them coupke of years back. It was cancelled due to covid. I had to request refund from airline and loveholiday sorted the hotel and forwarded flight refund later.

They are third party booking, not like TUI etc.

Here's some Contact details, I always email the CEO once I've tried all the contact details on the help pages of a site with no success. Obviously the CEO doesn't see or reply to your email but they do get routed into a complaints team so you end up with a response.

www.ceoemail.com/s.php?id=ceo-121026

You still have a degree of cover if you paid with a debit card , might be worth trying to start a charge back on the payment

They also send all info incl ATOL cert with booking confirmation email

Yeah they are impossible to get hold of over the phone, you call the number, get through to an automated message and then put in your holiday reference number , this only lets you talk to them if your holiday is within 7 days( then expect to wait in a huge que before talking to someone unhelpful) . And then as soon as your holiday starts the reference number doesn’t work and you can’t get in touch with anyone. The live chat portal closes too. Like imagine if there was an emergency on holiday and we needed their help. They are just such a bad company.

And the holiday was paid for in February so we may not be covered by the bank, but I will ask my partner to check.

otherwise I might try small claims, I’m that angry with love holidays I almost don’t care about the £80 court fee.

They are awful. They cancelled our holiday during covid (no issues with this)

Despite is being a package deal they said the flights were still going it was just the hotel that was cancelled.

In the end we did not get a refund for the flights, just the accommodations and all inclusive.

I'm not sure what they would have expected us to do if we had got on the flight!

I will have a look at ATOL first.

And I think it might have been American Airlines the flights were booked with. Will have to check. Love holidays were super vague about it though, I think the flights were actually cancelled before we had any official confirmation on flights.

User354 they wouldn’t care what you would do if you had got the flight. They already had your money, and you have no way to contact them once your there so it’s no longer their problem

How come you don't know the airline? When I booked I trawled through all the flights as I wanted a direct flight rather than the stop over ones, and the airline was clearly stated.

I did make sure I paid by credit card to avoid any potential problems and I'm flying with virgin Atlantic so fingers crossed they're ok!

@autumn1610 thank you. I'm nervous as I'm going on my own, but I've covered my arse as much as I can so it should be ok.

Also thank you fatagainlettucetime , I will email the CEO

Small claims court is the best way here - you can do it online today, you just need to pay a small fee and upload your evidence. It's very straightforward. Quickest way to get your money back.

What fo you mean vague?

This is how the flights show.
Are you sure you don't have confirmation in some junk file? It happens often. It helps to have that

Has your DP or you been dealing with this? I’m a bit surprised you don’t even know the airline - it should be on the confirmation mail - and they won’t speak to you if he’s the main traveller.

Taking this at face value:

• ATOL protected so go through that
• Ask your DP talk to his bank. No supplier wants a negative strike with any major bank in the UK
• twitter is good for quick replies
• phone numbers as above
• Final option - small claims court.

Your partner needs to be more proactive and stop saying he doesn't think anything will work.

I worked in a similar company and its probably not a package, they're known as a Flight + Hotel bookings and it's a workaround to avoid responsibility - they just blame the supplier. So your holiday will likely not be covered by ABTA.

If you have proof that you that:

• your flight was cancelled
• you have tried to contact the company
• there was no replacement flight booking or refund

Then I would go to trading standards, or at least call them and walk them through your situation and what proof you have.

The PP who mentioned contacting the airline to confirm they have refunded LH is also really good idea, so you have firm evidence.

The no refunds clause is for people who just want to cancel their holiday, that's not the case with your situation.

I mean this gently OP but it sounds like you’re not very clear on the details yourselves and that you didn’t fight very hard at the time when you knew your flights were cancelled. I’m really surprised you went ahead and booked your own replacement flights instead of contacting the airline yourself or putting more pressure on LoveHolidays to rebook. When you said they ‘never did’ sort the flights, how many times did you ask? I’d have been on the phone/live chat every day asking what was going on.

I’m sure that when you book a LH holiday you pick your flights, and you would have got confirmation of your flight details when you booked, as the screenshot someone posted above shows, so I’m confused about how you didn’t have any record of which airline your flights were with.

Unfortunately it sounds like you’re trying to sort things out much too late after the fact, which is going to make things much trickier. Did you have travel insurance? I would have thought you could have sorted replacement flights through that, at least, if you really couldn’t get LoveHolidays to do it. By choosing to pay out of pocket for new flights and worrying about it later, I fear you might have made life harder for yourself.

Sorry if I'm mistaken, have you already been on the holiday? I guess that might make things trickier?

We were in a similar position a few weeks ago, booked with loveholidays in March to fly in mid September. Late August got an email direct from the airline to say flights had been cancelled.

We had to be proactive and tell loveholidays our flight had been cancelled and what option we were taking (there was a section in manage my booking where you put whether the airline had offered alternative flights etc). My DH selected the option to say we wanted a refund but loveholidays came back to say we had to request this from the airline ourselves. I called the airline and they refunded the money to loveholidays.

I was really annoyed because loveholidays said we needed to speak to the flight team and be offered alternative flights (I'd already looked and knew there weren't any suitable so we just wanted a refund so we could book something else). They were vague about timescales even though it was less than 4 weeks til our holiday.

I got antsy after reading the reviews so I did moan on social media about the vagueness and the flight team got in touch the same day with an offer of unsuitable flights, I declined and requested a refund, which was in our bank within 5 working days. In all, it was a week from flights being cancelled to money back in our bank but we did have to fight to get them to acknowledge us in the first place.

We've rebooked with a different tour operator now.

It seems as though the communication with loveholidays is non-existent and I would be hesitant to book with them again even though our complaint was dealt with quickly (although I think that was only because I was so vocal).

I hope you get your money back soon, I'd definitely recommend using social channels to get to speak to an actual person as that seems to be the biggest challenge. Be polite but firm, tell them the solution you want repeatedly.

Good luck!

Write to them here:

3 Shortlands, London W6 8DA

Send a letter by recorded delivery stating what happened and that they have 28 days to refund the original flights to you. Otherwise you will take them to small claims court.

I suspect some of the stuff on the internet about people not getting anywhere with small claims is posted by love holidays.

It doesn't matter what they put in a contract as it's not possible to contract out of UK law. That this means is they can put what they like in a contract, but if it contradicts what it written in law it doesn't count. Consumer Law covers you if you have paid for something and not received it or a refund.

Trading standards also has an advice line. 0808 223 1133, which is free and very helpful.

You could also try the Moneybox programme on Radio 4. They sometimes take up cases like yours.

Thanks for the head's up. Definitely a company to avoid!

Try resolver.co.uk