Bargain holidays...not!
Have you ever come across an absolute bargain online and thought oh yes, yes, that is a bit of me! ... that's exactly how it went in my head when having a look for a cheap getaway for me and Alfie and I came across a £198 break, all in, for us both on Wowcher.
You know how the saying goes though - if it seems too good to be true, it probably is!
And it definitely turned out to be.
From hidden costs to booking mistakes and extra charges, it's been a far from ideal experience really. Though I should have known there would be issues, when at booking stage with the travel agent side it all started to cost more, for less than the offer was presented as. This resulted in that cheap £198 getaway looking to doubling, or tripling, in price. The whole point of looking and booking was to save the money and if I'd have wanted to pay £600 instead then I'll have probably had a nosey elsewhere.
I'm not the only one to complain about this apparently, as I've since found many of similar complaints online, and it seems to be a common running theme from budget websites. You'll be allocated the worst flights, minimising your time on your holiday, flying out at 10pm and coming home at 6pm so you miss two full days to travelling, and any other flights are an added bonus with an added cost. Flights are also set from certain airports, taking off from one, and returning to another some 75 miles away., and there's an added charge to change that too. Then you'll be supplied the bottom of the pack, bog standard accommodation, which is what you'd expect really given the price of the getaway, but the pressure to change this is immense as you're actively put off keeping it through clever marketing tactics. The icing on the cake is the attempt of persuasion from the other end of the phone to change your holiday destination completely. A joke really.
As if those hidden costs weren't enough, they had also made a mistake on the booking information for the flight which detailed Alfie as an adult instead of a child... which wouldn't have been an issue if it hadn't become my problem to rectify at a cost of £115 to change this tiny detail - almost as much as the holiday itself!
Imagine trying to charge that much for someone to log on to a computer, find the details of the holiday, and simply change the information for one of the passengers from adult to child. It takes literally seconds, and something I could do easily myself if there was the platform to - maybe then I'd pay myself the £115 admin fee, hey!
We didn't bother going in the end unfortunately. I refused to pay all the extra costs and I'm currently finding out where I stand legally to recoup a refund for what I've already paid, it doesn't sit right that they're taking people's money without being up front on initially booking about the extra costs incurred.
Do you have any experience with this? It seems to be more common than I thought it would be!
Would love to hear your stories.