British Airways has always been a solid, reliable and trustworthy company when it has come to providing my family with flights and holidays. If you had asked me a few months ago whether I would write a review on Ciao which questioned their sanity and took them to task on their scroogey compensation policies I would have scoffed at the idea.
Never the less, here I am with a tale of woe.
The holiday was for my mother and my father and it was going to be a wonderful one. Imagine this: fly from London to Vancouver and stay there for a few nights in a plush hotel. From Canada fly to Hawaii and stay there in sheer luxury for a week. Then, to finish it all off, fly from Hawaii to Australia
to meet up with my mother’s family and her sickly mother. My father is a solicitor and so he’s a bit of a wizard with the paperwork, everything was defined wonderfully and tied up neatly.
The one concern he expressed to me before jetting off was that he would have to drive from the airport in Vancouver to the hotel because British Airways were not going to send anyone out to meet them. Fair enough, I suppose. However, BA had provided explicit details of how to get to the hotel from the airport and so everything should be fine.
The flight itself was just right and the BA staff friendly and efficient. The problems started when they touched down in Canada.
The car rental place, the one that BA had arranged for them so that a car would be waiting, was closed and there was no waiting car. Thankfully, though, they where able to find somewhere else and rented a car from scratch.
The map from the airport to the hotel was followed and the textual instructions consulted. It did indeed point to a hotel but, guess what, the hotel was closed. There was a large sign outside the hotel building which announced it had been closed for a /number of years/ which was, as you can imagine, a bit worrying for a tired couple who had just flown around the world and battled to rent a car. I said my father is a lawyer, right, he took a number of photographs of the closed building and these photographs clearly showed the “For Sale” sign and the street name sign as well. The building was unquestionably the one that BA had directed them to.
Luckily, this was the old site for the hotel. The map and instructions, which BA had given out, was simply out of date. My parents where able to - with the help of friendly Canadian locals - finally drive to the real hotel.
The enjoyed the holiday.
On arriving back home in Scotland my father promptly wrote to BA. To their credit BA replied swiftly and after only one back-and-forth exchanged offered up a cheque. There was catch, though. The compensation was rather small and /only/ due to the problem with the cars. BA denied that their map pointed to the wrong building. My father has provided them with a photocopy of the map they gave then and a copy of the textual instructions that went with it. The street address given (the incorrect one) has been hi-lighted in bright yellow for them. They have been provided of photographs of my mother standing outside the closed hotel with both signs (the one which announced the hotel’s name and that it was closed and the street sign) clearly visible.
BA are denying the one fact my parents had remembered to collect solid evidence of.
Insanity.
… or perhaps not. There was a legal catch with the cheque that they sent out for the car mix up. The small print in that letter said that if my parents had accepted that small compensation for the car mix up then they would also be accepting that there was no problem with the map to the hotel. It was a good thing that lawyers tend to read even the finest of the fine print. The compensation for mixing up the cars would be a relatively small amount but the compensation BA would have to pay out for wrongly sending a tired couple into a rather rundown part of a foreign city is rather more. British Airways were, it seems to me, trying to pull a fast one.
BA have been send back the cheque and we’re still waiting (a few months now) for them to admit that the map was out of date.
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I found it. HUMMM...Your parents must have been really cross (I rarely swear on the internet as children maybe looking!). I have written letters of complaint about various problems I have experienced. A solicitor once told me to gather as much information as possible for evidence. It pays you get results. I hope you father gets a fair settlement.
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Dec 5th, 2000
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