Help, cancelled holiday and struggling with refund/compensation

[SOOOOCrosswithGotoGate]

Hi, back in April I booked a much anticipated 3 day break to visit old friends in Ireland with the family last week. Both husband and I were working that day so scrambled to collect kids and ended up taking separate taxis to airport to not miss flight. Got to the airport to discover that the airline had cancelled the flight over 2 months ago!! They don't even fly that route anymore!! No other flights from that airport to where we wanted to go, was a flight to Dublin, but not enough seats, the next flight from a different airpot the next day was £400 per head, to cut a long story short, that was the end of the holiday.
The airline (CityJet) were rather nice at the airport, gave me an email showing that they had notified GotoGate which was the website I booked through on 12 May. As I booked with GotoGate they said that is where I should go for my money which makes sense to me.

But I have been really struggling with getting a straight answer from GotoGate. As advised I submitted an online claim last Thursday and got an email saying they would respond by 3 pm today. They hadn't, so I called again. Various people told me that they had called me on Saturday (they hadn't) and the complaint was closed. That I had to contact the airline (I have, see above,) plus it was GotoGate that took my money! That they will contact the airline and I have to wait 2 - 8 weeks, it is over 8 weeks since they knew about this anyway, plus I have nothing in writing from them saying that is what they will do and they won't give that to me.

They don't have anything on their site about how to contact if you're not happy and they are not ABTA registered and I just don't know who to go to to get some movement on this as getting narky with some customer services person isn't getting me anywhere. I've checked Instagram and Twitter and they're not on it so I can't even try tweeting them, etc.

I'm also trying to claim for the taxis we took to the airport, plus the one home with the sobbing kids, as I consider those costs to be incurred because they didn't tell me the flight was cancelled!! All in all I am down nearly £600 for this, not to mention disappointed family and not seeing my friend I haven't seen for a couple of years!
Sorry for the long post, all advice much appreciated!
Thanks

Claim on your travel insurance?

Thanks, yes I was thinking about that, but I thought they would tell me it was owed by the company, but I'll check that out tomorrow. I suppose I was looking for some sort of consumer forum as I can't believe a company can get away with doing this!

If you paid by credit card or paypal you could do a chargeback, you won't get credit for the extra costs incurred but you would get pack your payment for the tickets.

trading standards or CAA might be worth contacting. but if they are digging their heels in (as did another large holiday company with me) there's nothing much CAA can do. In that case its the small claims court.

Did they send an email to you? did it go into your junk inbox?

No email (I worried about that!) they confirmed they never sent anything, but there is small print on their site that says you have to check yourself for cancellations. However, their customer services said they never sent anything because of an internal processing issue. The problem is they don't put anything in writing to me and every time I talk to someone I get a different answer. I think the claim that you have to check yourself in cancellations wouldn't stand up in the UK as being fair Terms & Conditions but because it's a Swedish registered company it's not clear whether I could take them to the Small Claims Court. Though it is a huge European operator. Oh such a lesson in reading the small print on this stuff!

Even if you had read the small print you would be due a full refund for the cancelled flights. I hope this is sorted for you quickly.

If they are refusing to put anything in writing, could you tell them that you're recording the call as proof and that you'll send them transcripts of the conversations by email for their records so that you are creating a paper trail.

I'm assuming that they will have said at the start of the call that the call may be recorded for training purposes so if you want to record the call too they can hardly complain! Or you can say that you're also recording it for training purposes training yourself to deal with annoying companies!

Good luck in getting something back from them.

Might also be worth contacting some of the newspaper travel problem columns (they often want you to put your name to it, but usually a 'Sally from Oxford' rather than full identifying details) to see if they could help - or somebody like Martin Lewis from the MoneySavingExpert website - frame it along the lines of maybe they could warn other people about this so they don't lose their money too...