AIBU?
To feel robbed by love holidays
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 05:10
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?
Am I being unreasonable?
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MNCar · 06/09/2022 17:23
You tried emailing the ceo ?
[email protected]
careers.loveholidays.com/people/549767-donat-retif
PopPopPopP · 06/09/2022 17:27
I've been on a couple of loveholidays package holidays and they were very cheap compared to other companies, and the holidays excellent, so we will likely use them again.
However, this year I did need to call them to change something about the holiday and was never able to get through on the phone so eventually gave up.
I think if something goes wrong and you need to speak to someone, that's where things go tits up! Otherwise, they can be excellent value
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 17:33
Yes we went on the holiday but had to book our own flights as there was no flights at all on the manage our booking . So love holidays held onto our money for the fights but never actually booked any in the end. The total amount love holiday took for flights was £1400 , which they basically stole soon as they didn’t book the flights.
what we want from love holidays is a partial refund , we did use the hotel but the money we gave them to arrange our flights should be refunded.
I have asked partner to email the CEO tonight, as booking was all done in his name. How long should we wait for a reply before going to the small claims court do you think?
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 17:37
If we hadn’t had booked our own flights there would literally have been no holiday at all . In the end it ended up being a lot more expensive than using a more reputable company would have been. So what seemed like a good deal at the time actually really wasn’t
elessar · 06/09/2022 17:37
Look OP I don't doubt that LH were difficult to deal with and difficult to get in touch with, and probably were pretty rubbish at dealing with the issue you had. The reason you're getting a hard time is because you're asserting things that aren't true (like you weren't made aware of the flight details) and because you didn't resolve this before going on holiday.
Did you, before your holiday, state that the alternate flights offered were not acceptable and you wanted a refund?
If so then you should absolutely be able to pursue this with them (I'd probably push via social media and through their complaints process rather than small claims yet) but as another PP said you need to document what happened and the various steps much more clearly than you have here.
FWIW if you want the proper protection of a package holiday, you should book through an ABTA bonded tour operator. If not, you may as well just book the flights and hotel separately - at least then you can deal directly with the airline if something does go wrong and you're not reliant on a middle man.
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 17:41
We have learnt our lesson the hard way to absolutely always book holidays with companies that are ABTA protected.
And when they gave us the option of really unsuitable flights we at first asked them to arrange different flights. After they failed to do that we asked for a partial refund. And then booked our own flights.
Love holidays clearly don’t like to honour refunds.
Bubblebubblebah · 06/09/2022 17:42
FWIW if you want the proper protection of a package holiday, you should book through an ABTA bonded tour operator
You should book oackage holidays the though. This is not it.
Agree though that only reason why op is getting hard time is because the story is not straight. I very strongly suspect DP has some emails in their mailbox they missed...
SheeWeee · 06/09/2022 18:01
the information they gave us on the flights included the times and the number of the actual flight. But we have no reference number for the actual airlines. I don’t know if airlines would have our details if we just have our names ect
But you said you didn't even know what airline your flight was booked with! You're contradicting yourself with every post.
It wasn't on the booking but you had the details, except you didn't have the details, but you did, they were cancelled and not rebooked, then they were rebooked but cancelled again, then they wouldn't rebook at all, then you couldn't taslk to anyone but you did talk to someone.....none of it makes any sense at all.
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:03
So been nagging partner to check through all the info he has saved on his phone, and I get excited as we find the ATOL certificate, so find the claim form with ATOL online and the drop down menu it gives you to select from doesn’t even have love holidays or their ATOL number on there. What a joke…. So I don’t know if there’s another way of going through ATOL other than the online form. Anyone done a ATOL claim before here?
Bubblebubblebah · 06/09/2022 18:06
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:03
So been nagging partner to check through all the info he has saved on his phone, and I get excited as we find the ATOL certificate, so find the claim form with ATOL online and the drop down menu it gives you to select from doesn’t even have love holidays or their ATOL number on there. What a joke…. So I don’t know if there’s another way of going through ATOL other than the online form. Anyone done a ATOL claim before here?
So now he found the booking confirmation that's where all other info is...
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:08
Shewee do you still have the customer help line you spoke of before?
is it the same one that puts you through to an automated message that takes your love holiday reference number and then only lets you talk to someone just before a booked holiday?
If you have found a different number that will actually let me talk to a human being then that number would be super helpful to me.
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:13
Yeah he’s found it, but it only gives us the holiday reference number to use with love holidays. I was looking for airline reference numbers that I could maybe use to phone up the airlines but they don’t appear to have supplied any.
Im thinking now I have found the ATOL certificate there’s got to be some protection with that. But the online form doesn’t have love holiday or their ATOL number in the drop down menu on the form. 🤔
Bubblebubblebah · 06/09/2022 18:23
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:13
Yeah he’s found it, but it only gives us the holiday reference number to use with love holidays. I was looking for airline reference numbers that I could maybe use to phone up the airlines but they don’t appear to have supplied any.
Im thinking now I have found the ATOL certificate there’s got to be some protection with that. But the online form doesn’t have love holiday or their ATOL number in the drop down menu on the form. 🤔
There should be another pdf with all details
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:28
Also I know it’s confusing but this is what happened shewee
so basically my OH books the holiday online, all is good, we are excited for our holiday. Then partner gets a phone call from love holiday rep saying airline has cancelled the flights but they have found other flights they can book but they need £200 more to do this so we agree, those flights are on the manage my booking, all looks good again. Then the flights disappear from manage my booking. We find out either through chat thing on there or email that those flights are also cancelled. I don’t remember how they told us but I know it wasn’t over the phone like the time before. Partner then has this really long correspondence with them through chat function and gets very slow replies. They offer us one option for flights which is totally unacceptable and no one in their right mind would accept. And they ask if we want to book those flights, partner says no to what they offer and asks if they can offer different flights. They say they will look into it and be in touch in a few days but never are. Partner complains to anyone who will listen, each person he talks to says a different department deals with flights and they will leave a message and so on. Well the love holiday flight team never do arrange new flights. In manage my booking the flights section is completely empty. So we book our own flights. And then request a partial refund of the £1400 . And they apparently do not want to give us our money back.
Testina · 06/09/2022 18:28
ATOL doesn’t cover everything that Love Holidays sell - that’s stated clearly on their website. Some flight booking are covered, but not all.
There’s no point charging around with talk of small claims etc, when you and your boyfriend haven’t even read the emails you have.
There is a bit on the Love Holidays about them using www.huntadr.com for dispute resolution. Link fyi but you go through LH for Hunt ADR. I can’t imagine that Small Claims wouldn’t expect you to exhaust the company’s own resolution process first.
On the same page I saw a dedicated number for in-resort resolution too, which doesn’t fit with you saying that once your holiday has started there is no number to call them.
You didn’t answer my earlier question - how did you leave it with live chat (despite the slow response) - has your boyfriend not returned to the chat to keep asking?
Testina · 06/09/2022 18:32
What mechanism did you use to request the partial refund?
I don’t doubt that speaking to a real person who takes responsibility is hell. I’ve had my own trials with Hermes!
But the fact you keep coming back with totally new info that you claimed not to have, suggests that your boyfriend isn’t very good at reading emails.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got another email saying, “click here for your refund application” that he just hasn’t bothered to read!
Testina · 06/09/2022 18:33
Chloefairydust · 06/09/2022 18:31
Oh yes he kept asking alright.
Can you tell me what number that is you have found because I can’t find it?
I went to the ATOL website and used search by name, and typed in Love Holidays.
www.caa.co.uk/atol-protection/check-an-atol/search-atol-holders/
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