{"id":1170,"date":"2015-11-09T10:01:57","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T00:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2015-11-09T10:01:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T00:01:57","slug":"when-holidays-go-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/when-holidays-go-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"When Holidays Go Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My wife and I were meant to be flying to Bali this week, but it very much looks like that&#8217;s not going to happen. Even if our flight did\u00a0reach Bali, we&#8217;d almost certainly be in a queue\u00a0trying to return\u00a0home, as there are\u00a0thousands of other travellers who&#8217;ve been stuck\u00a0for several days already.<\/p>\n<p>Volcanic eruptions are out of anyone&#8217;s control, but the response which companies give to a situation like this is revealing. A few slightly ranty bullet points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Virgin Australia&#8217;s customer support line isn&#8217;t a freecall number in Australia, which cost some people a lot\u00a0if\u00a0they&#8217;re on hold for hours. There is also no kind of notification of how long you&#8217;ll be on hold, or how many people are in front of you.<\/li>\n<li>After eventually getting through, staff were hamstrung by their own policies\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Wotif would have\u00a0to make any changes.<\/li>\n<li>To a travel arranger like Wotif, Virgin Australia\u00a0is regarded as a &#8220;regular&#8221; airline while Jetstar is a\u00a0&#8220;low cost&#8221; airline. You must\u00a0make\u00a0changes directly with a low cost airline, but Wotif has to make changes with\u00a0a regular airline. I&#8217;d much rather deal with the airline directly \u2014 why can&#8217;t I?<\/li>\n<li>Wotif do have a freecall number, and a callback service. Unfortunately, yesterday\u00a0I\u00a0was told the callback would be 1 hour 20 minutes, but it was over 3 hours. When they called me back, I was then put on hold(!)\u00a0for another hour and 15 minutes. Insane.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve had no dealings with Jetstar, but you can at least (try to?) contact them through Skype.<\/li>\n<li>The airlines only cancel flights day by day. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virginaustralia.com\/au\/en\/bookings\/flight-status\/travel-alerts\/\">Virgin&#8217;s\u00a0language today<\/a> is indicating pretty clearly that if they can fly on Wednesday they&#8217;ll only be taking empty planes to Bali to fly people home, but they haven&#8217;t actually cancelled our flight yet.<\/li>\n<li>Virgin are offering replacement destinations &#8220;for free&#8221;\u00a0(codeshare costs extra)\u00a0but they\u00a0are all domestic\/uninteresting\/cheaper from\u00a0Brisbane. (And why isn&#8217;t Perth on the list when flights to Broome (via Perth) are?)<\/li>\n<li>Days ago, Jetstar allowed passengers with flights booked through the end of this week to pre-emptively cancel their\u00a0flights for a travel credit, but Virgin didn&#8217;t. Virgin&#8217;s public language only mentioned changes, and refunds could only be arranged by talking to Wotif, who would then read\u00a0Virgin&#8217;s fine print and ask them nicely.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jetstar.com\/au\/en\/travel-alerts#Bali%20-%20Volcanic%20Ash%20Cloud%20Disruptions\">Jetstar are now also offering replacement flights<\/a> to many other destinations (Hawaii\/Fiji\/Thailand\/NZ) with no change fees. Virgin&#8217;s more exotic (codeshare) destinations cost an unknown amount of extra money.<\/li>\n<li>Wotif can cancel our flights and get our money back from the airline now, but until\u00a0the flight is officially cancelled, we&#8217;re less likely to get our money back from the hotel (and there&#8217;s still no guarantee). We therefore have to wait until it&#8217;s officially cancelled before making any other bookings, and\u00a0can&#8217;t book any replacement holiday until the day before, when all the cheap tickets are gone.<\/li>\n<li><del>Finally, Wotif want an $80\/person rebooking fee.<\/del> Apparently not, according to the \u00a0person I spoke to today.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Lessons learned?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Maybe the savings from a package aren&#8217;t worth it. Booking directly is much easier to manage.<\/li>\n<li>Wotif and Virgin could both communicate a whole lot better. I&#8217;ve had absolutely no proactive communication from either company, I&#8217;ve\u00a0had to call them, and each call has taken a long time.<\/li>\n<li>Earlier pre-emptive cancellation of flights would help a whole lot of people to actually\u00a0have a holiday.<\/li>\n<li>Wotif really need to react better to this situation. Why not earn some goodwill and actively offer replacement holidays to anyone still in Australia?<\/li>\n<li>Wotif really shouldn&#8217;t be calling people back to put them on hold, or charging $160 to make a booking. They should be emailing people to let them know they might not be going on holiday in two days time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Enough. Hopefully everyone stuck in Bali can get home soon.<\/p>\n<p>EDIT: Virgin finally cancelled the flight today on their travel alerts page, so I rang Wotif to get a refund. Full flight credit received, and hotel refunded too. An hour or two after that, Virgin emailed me to say my flight was cancelled. Better late than never?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My wife and I were meant to be flying to Bali this week, but it very much looks like that&#8217;s not going to happen. Even if our flight did\u00a0reach Bali, we&#8217;d almost certainly be in a queue\u00a0trying to return\u00a0home, as there are\u00a0thousands of other travellers who&#8217;ve been stuck\u00a0for several days already. Volcanic eruptions are out &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/when-holidays-go-bad\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">When Holidays Go Bad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}