This year, we decided on a holiday to Tenerife. After searching through most of the main high street travel agents we thought we'd have a look on the internet. We looked at the main holiday websites, expedia, lastminute and the like then we found Thomson.
--Website-- When you first open the Thomson website, all you can see is blue skies and even bluer water! It does make you want to drift away to where that photo has been taken. On the top tabs you have the choice of: Home-takes you back to the main page Destinations-loads up a globe where you can pick anywhere in the world to explore. Click on the desintation you want to look at and it will give you some basic info, photos and reccomended hotels. Holidays-more info below Build your on holiday-here you can choose your flights, hotel, car rental and insurance. Flights-Allows you to book a Thomson flight without any hotel or 'packaging'. Hotels-Allows you to book a hotel without the flights. Extras-Here you can choose car rental, insurance, airport lounges and transfers not normally included in your holiday price. Deals-Has a list of the deals that Thomson have running in certain areas
of the world. TV-Shows the deals that they are showing on Thomson TV
-Holidays- OK i used the above mentioned holidays tab. If you click on the holidays tab you can choose from sun, ski, cruise.... Then you can choose if you want a package holiday, flights and hotel, hotel or flights (basically giving you the options from the top tabs again. You choose your departing date if you are flexible with your date you can use the +/- tab (which lets you choose how many days either side of the chosen date) and how long you are staying for. You then pick your brochure, these are the same brochures that they give away in their stores, you can leave it as 'any' if you dont know or dont mind. You pick your departing airport (you can leave as 'any london' if you dont mind which airport. Destination, you can leave this blank if you just want to search for general prices. If you know where you want to stay you can also chose resort and accomodation if you know the name. You can then choose how many rooms you want and how many people are in your party. Then click search
For my holiday i picked 'hotels' in the holidays tab as i wanted to check prices on if i booked the flights and hotel seperately. So i chose my departure date, chose the amount of nights i wanted to stay, and chose Tenerife. As i wasnt fussy on where we stayed in Tenerife, i left Resort and accomodation blank. 1 room 2 adults, search! Then the hotels that are available for the duration of your stay pop up, they are arranged with Thomsons recommended at the top (most expensive lol). You can change this to filter them by price, hotel class or hotel name. I chose price! This is where the deal of the century can come in! There was the perfect hotel at the top of the list for £30!! £30 for 13 nights! I nearly fell off my chair. After checking 3 times that i had the dates right and the amount of people etc , i snapped the deal up. You are given some general info on the hotel on this front page, amenities and thomsons rating of the hotel. You can expend these details, add the hotel to your favourites or view it on a map. Expanding the details will show you more info on the hotel with photos.
--Booking-- Once you have found the hotel you want, click continue. You can add a flight here, insurance, car hire, and which room you want (if there is a selection, sea view, pool view etc). Once you have added any extras and agreed to the terms and conditions of insurance (even if you dont want insurance you agree that its coming out of your pocket if you need hospital treatment) click continue. The total cost of the hotel is shown down the left hand side of the page. You must then fill in the details of the passengers you will be staying with. You also fill in your credit card details and agree to their terms and conditions and then click pay. The next page will confirm your booking and give you a booking number. This booking will also be sent to you via email. If you have any problems you can call Thomson and give them your booking reference.
--Telephone Service-- We tried to book our flights online too but the system had crashed so we decided to give them a call on the number that was on the hotel boooking form. We gave them the date we were flying out and coming back and to which airport we wanted to fly to and from and they were able to pull up their flights. They also give you a choice of different flight times if there are any available. The teleephone service was pretty good and we were impressed that it was based in the UK unlike many other large companies. They also managed to add in transfers from the airport to our resort for no extra cost. The flights were booked over the phone with minimum fuss, these too were paid by credit card. We also received an email confirmation of our order.
--After Sale Service-- Around a month after booking the hotel and flights we received an email from Thomson advising that on the day we had booked our holiday there was a techinical error with their system and the flight that we were booked on was not actually running. They advised that they had booked us on a flight 2 days earlier. We decided we would call Thomson and ask why they had taken a month to come back to us with this problem. When we called and were put through to the complaints department we gave our booking reference and you could hear the lady on the end of the phone freeze. We asked why it had taken a month to contact us regarding this problem and she just replied 'we had to contact all customers on this flight, unfortunately you were one of the last booked on'. Not only had the system ruined our holiday plans, it had ruined other peoples too. We asked if they would be paying for the extra 2 nights in the hotel as it was their fault and she said no, although we were pretty certain she would say that anyway. There was no point putting up much of a fight as in Thomsons t&cs it probably does state that they can ruin your holiday if their system goes haywire for the day. After much debating, we had to cancel the holiday. This was a shame as altogether the 13nights in Tenerife had only cost £330.00. The money was returned within 3 days
--Conclusion-- Thomson have a good website and pretty good customer service, although their system let them down on this occasion. Unfortunately as with most large companies, their terms and conditions (which you have to agree to to book your holiday) do get them out of almost everything that could go wrong. Its a shame really as to keep our business all they had to do was stump up £30 to put us in a hotel for the extra 2 nights. I dont think i will be booking with Thomson again, the let down of this holiday was just too much :o(
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Feb 21st, 2007
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