I am new to this forum but I could really do with some advice if anyone out there knows a reliable and legal way to get a holiday company to listen to you.

Last January we booked a Holiday in Egypt with Thomas Cook online, to leave on April the 1st [ironic really as it has been a joke ever since]. We were personally recommended the award winning and upmarket resort and looked forward to a week in the sun.

We were called by T C on Good Friday Evening to say that due to overbooking by the hotel, we were being moved not only to another hotel but to a totally different although supposedly equal standard resort-no compensation whatsover was offered, although they did promise to send complaint forms-we have been waiting since March for these! With the Easter Holidays and the fact that we had already paid to get a connecting flight we had little choice but to accept, and after several lengthy phonecalls we gave in. All we had actually asked for was a modest upgrade to half board for the week, a matter of a buffet meal each night for 2 people-this was not allowed.

The hotel they placed us in was absolutely fine, but the resort or what there was of it was scary, huge holes in the roads, unlit streets, hardly any facilities nearby, abandoned buildings barbed wire and empty shops-did I also mention the aggressive taxi drivers who tried to cheat you at every turn, and the piles of rubbish everywhere.

Our fellow deportees at the hotel were just as upset as we were, the rep had not been told she had a party of angry people landing on her doorstep. Eventually after some exchanges of views, £100 cash per couple, a supposed goodwill gesture, turned up in an envelope from the rep who was the only person who seemed to care.

Obviously we filled in a complaint form at the resort, which has not been followed up at all. I also e-mailed them and provided them with all the details they needed, they promised under the ABTA code to contact me within 28 days of receipt and provide a dedicated member of staff to deal with our complaint, that was April the 18th and we are now into June-despite 5 more e-mails they just won't contact us and we have now gone to ABTA for help and we don't know what else to do.

If anyone can suggest a course of action we could try to make them at least live up to their obligations or at the very least listen to us-we would love to hear it.

I hope this advice is of help to you. It is a procedure I have followed on several occassions, and each time I have succeeded.

Do not write to TC again. Instead go to Money Claim On-line, the government internet court service based at northampton county court. Find the registered office of TC and issue a writ against them at that address for the full value of your holiday for breach of contact. If you paid for your holiday by CC, name the CC company as the 2nd defendant.

This will not cost you much and you should recover the costs from the other side. I am not a lawyer but after a similar experience to yours, I succeeded in my Action against First Choice.

The travel companies are experts at ignoring your calls, letters and e-mails. They will not ignore your Action; if they do, you will automatically win by default in 21 days; I had the joy of sending the bailiffs into my local First Choice (after we were given an inferior hotel in an allocation on arrival holiday to Cyprus in 2006) and they took the settlement out of the foreign exchange till!

Good luck; please post how you get on. Remember to use the registered office address of TC. It's legally very important.

Hi,

Thanks to everyone who wrote back. We didn't get anywhere with the holiday company this time although ABTA were extremely helpful and professional throughout. We will think twice about booking online again. We will NEVER book with that particular holiday company but we will remember everything we have learned about possible avanues of litigation.

Once again thanks for all the advice

T.J

Hi,

We didn't do too well in the end, the company hung it out for months and then phoned home during the working day, after ABTA got onto them for breaking their time limit. I think they were hoping we wouldn't be in and they could claim they had contacted us, but we were in waiting for a delivery and surprised them. They actually said that they didn't need to pay us any compensation despite giving us four days notice (including 2 bank holidays over Easter) to make alternative arrangements, and moving our hotel and resort, because they were not responsible for what their resorts were like.Because we still went through the same airport as we would have gone to for our original destination it didn't count as a major change of holiday. I mean Times Square and The Bronx are both covered by the same airport but I wouldn't call them similar destinations. Their original report back to us didn't even have the right details on it as they said that we had complained about noisy building work when we were actually complaining that none of the half finished hotels surrounding our hotel had been touched in over 15 years.

In the end it made no sense to spend good money after bad paying for legal action, I actually ended the phone conversation myself as it was perfectly obvious that they were not going to budge an inch to the point of lunacy. I ended with saying that they had wasted enough of my time and that I could do them far more damage than they could ever do me, as they had not only permanently lost a customer, but I would through any means possible make sure that anyone I knew would never book with them again and I meant it.

I hope you had a better experience than I did, I am now permanently off package holidays and Thomas Cook will never receive a single penny of my money ever again.

Kind regards

T.J.