Airtours International - AIH > Reviews > PREMIAIR GOLD - AIRTOURS. What a rip-off

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality	Satisfactory
Customer Service	Nothing special
Punctuality	Satisfactory
Space	Outstanding
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Plenty of Legroom, Comfortable Seats
Disadvantages:	An Awful Lot !  Please Read Review .  .  .  .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

A few years ago, we booked with AIRTOURS INTERNATIONAL on our first trip abroad to Mexico. We enjoyed this extremely! The only fault with the flight, was with the cramped 'cattle shed' aircraft.

So, the following year, we booked with AIRTOURS again and travelled to Dom.Republic. This time taking advantage of the flight upgrades - PREMIAIR GOLD. Costing approximately £249 each, this included wider more comfortable seats, additional legroom and a greater seat recline. All Premiar Gold passengers have a seatback television screen with a choice of 6 movie channels a further 10 channels of audio - which did cater for a wide audience of music listeners!
Computer games and free use of control pads- which usually they charge £5 to hire in order to play the games, they hooked up to the screen in front of you!
As well as benefitting from a complimentary bar, fresh fruit, increased baggage allowance, priority baggage collection and newspapers and magazines.
Also when booking this flight upgrade you have a choice of 11 in-flight meals to choose from but have to be pre-ordered.

Anyway, we thought this was wonderful on our outbound journey. The air crew came round each of the seats, which seemed like every 10 minutes, offering fresh fruit, Ice creams, newspapers etc....
My boyfriend, now husband, then was very impressed with the complimentary bar service that they offered as was barely sober by the time our 11 hour flight was up! Only as listed in the upgrades, there wasn't the use of computer games as there was a 'minor technical problem' with these but were promised that these should be working on our return journey.

However, after a wonderful flight going and also a great holiday, it was the return journey that was appalling!

The computer game facility on the aircraft were still out of order! And were informed from other Airtours Passengers that these were not working when they had flown with airtours a year later!
The same films and music channels as on our outbound journey making an 11 hr flight very boring.

But to add more...............
NO COMPLIMENTARY BAR!

Apparantly, all the stock had been used on the aircrafts outbound journey to the Dominican Republic and the aircabin crew hadn't thought to re-stock, while our delay for them to re-fuel the aircraft for the return journey back to Manchester!
It was a case of HARD CHEESE!
You could see the anger of every passenger's face when they asked for a lager and 'there isn't any'was the reply! My husband had gone all the way down the drinks menu and NOTHING!
The air hostess could not even offer us the supply they did have, which was for sale to non Premiair passengers. Seeing as though they already had our money, they were only interested in making money from those in the 'Cattle Class'!
Although it could not be offered to us complimentary, they would sell it to us, the PREMIAR Gold Passengers.
I know for a fact that many passengers, who had flown Premiair Gold on that flight, were writing letters of complaints when they returned home.

Which was exactly as we did!

We sent a detailed description of the complaints we had experienced, including the priority baggage that we didn't get priority for on our outbound journey.
Three weeks later we received a letter from them, blaintantly not apologising and offering a £50 voucher off our next Airtours booking!

We then sent another letter of complaint along with this money off next booking voucher, saying that we still haven't received an apology or an explanation in their letter to us and that we will not be accepting the £50 voucher as we saw this as an insult and also that we would not be giving them our future business, either flying or booking an AIRTOURS holiday!

Two weeks later, we received a letter from them and a much 'pushed' for apology containing a personal cheque for the value of £50.

Well, I accepted this! Only as I could not be doing with the hassle of writing further time wasting letters to them - it was clear this was hopeless and a waste of time. £50 pound wasn't much as we had paid an extra £498 (£249 each)on the cost of our holiday. But you learn from your mistakes and ever since, when booking holidays, I refuse to book with AIRTOURS INTERNATIONAL.