I booked a weeks holiday as a late deal (3 weeks prior to departure) to Benidorm on 18th July 2000 through lateescapes.com which is an auction site owned by Airtours. Everything seemed to be running smoothly until we received a 3 1/2 hour delay at Manchester Airport and had to search for a rep to find out what was going on. Once we arrived at Alicanteairport and were transported to our accomodation we were then informed of a £50 refundable deposit (at the end of the week that is!) which had to be given to the manager of the accomodation to cover any breakages etc. I informed the rep that we had not been warned of this and thought it unfair that we had to wait until the end of the holiday to have this (what was part of our holiday spending money) returned. She blamed the organisation which I had booked the holiday through and said that they should have mentioned this at the time of booking the holiday. I informed her that we had booked directly through Airtours and she still blamed another firm - eh ? We had a wonderful holiday and I must in all fairness say that the standard of our accomodation was fantastic! That was until we arrived at Alicante Airport and was told that yet again our flight had been delayed by 3 1/2 hours and a departure time had still yet to be confirmed. We were told to still check in and go through to passport control where we would be provided with refreshments and a light snack. This arrived 3 hours later in the form of a glass of flat coke and a cheese sandwich which contained no butter and was as rubbery as gandy's flip-flop. The 3 1/2 hours had come and gone it was now 6am when we should of flown at 3am. No reps to be seen - people were extremely angry as we were not allowed to travel back through passport control and so had to wait in the departure lounge. At 8am after we had been at the airport now for 7 hours an Airtours rep arrived to say that the plane had still not taken off from Manchester and they had no idea what time we would be flown home !!!! We were told that there had been mechanical difficulties with the plane which had now been fixed only to be told the pilots had run out of flying hours!!!! All 250 passengers were then told that we would be taken to a nearby hotel for 3 hours where we should try and get some rest. When we got on the coach we were then told that the coach drivers were also out of hours and after a heated 30 minute discussion between the reps and the drivers we finally set off! By the time we had arrived and checked in I had around 1 hours sleep! We were then taken back to the airport and told that we would definitely be flying at 3pm we yet again had to wait and finally boarded an Air Scandic flight at 3.45pm. I am very disappointed with the way that Airtours handled this situation and could of asked for at the very least to be kept informed of the situation. I will definitely not be flying with Airtours again !!!
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Advantages: Staff try their best in a bad situation, its just a shame about the company they work for, and the flights are cheap (you get what you pay for) Disadvantages: Too many to list!
Sep 14th, 2000
somewhat helpful by (100%):
