That's terrible. You've got me worried now as I've not long booked accomodation in Prague with Jumbo Tours, through TR. When I saw their name on the invoice I thought Never heard of them. It's strange that you've heard nothing else about your complaint. Have Travel Republic informed you that they are trying to contact Jumbo Tours on your behalf. Since it was them who acted as your agent, they should do all they can to help you rectify the matter.

Have you informed your CC company that you want to dispute this payment. I'm sure they'll be able to help.

Contact rading standards, they give a prompt reply and are very helpfull. They are helping me at the moment with a dispute I have with Thomas Cook. If you put Trading Standards in Google you can go to their website and fill in an online form, they will contact you within days advising you what to do.

Sorry meant to say Trading Standards.

Travel republic have contacted Jumbo Tours without any luck so far they said they book an awful lot of their rooms via Jumbo Tours without many problems. I will contact Trading Standards tomorrow I think see what they say. ABTA replied and said they will be in touch in 28 days from 7th September...I shall see.

Firstly i am not supprise that you have not heard anything back from Jumbo, we started to use them earlier this year but they were a nightmare to deal with so we stopped using them.

Their prices were generally slightly cheaper than others but the service was not good as we had quite a few problems allowing us to book at one rate and the invoice shows another or they just cancelled the rooms and say tough luck.

They are quite a big company, just a shame we had so many problems with them

What was the £127.29 for?

AHV - The outstanding hotel bill, because the hotel had only been booked by Jumbo Tours/Travel Republic for 4 nights but was supposed to be 7 and the family were allowed to stay for 7.

Thats shocking though, at least you had your confirmation as proof of what you had paid for, although in this instance it made no difference in the end. I hope you get some satisfaction from ABTA/Jumbo Tours/Travel Republic as someone somewhere has clearly made a big mistake.

I received another letter from Travel republic today saying the Jumbo Tours have STILL not replied and they have asked for "immediate attention to this matter" from them. All relevant information is with ABTA and that is as far as I have proceeded so far once I hear from them one way or another I can make a decision about taking the case to small claims court. Just so people know the booking appears to have been made via Jumbo Tours then ETS a local Egyptian agent who we knew nothing about until a REP arrived in the hotel trying to sell us tours. Sometimes saving a few £s isn't worth it we had a 2 week package previously with Monarch Holidays at the same hotel without any hitches (our main reason for booking with TR was to fly from Birmingham and not Gatwick)

The only reason I asked was that £127 seems remarkably cheap for 3 nights in a 5* even in Egypt. Just my opinion of course.

I'm surprised to hear that you, and others apparently, are having problems with Jumbo Tours. I've previously used them via Travel Republic for room only bookings in Spain and had no problems but in those cases Jumbo Tours did appear to be dealing direct with the hotel and not through yet another intermediary. As Jumbo Tours are based in Spain and they appear to have then sub-contracted the booking to an Egyptian based company, it might not be possible to get much joy through the English courts. As you paid with your credit card, as others have advised, it would be a good idea to pursue your credit card company for the refund of the additional money you paid out. As for further compensation, you will need to itemise this and ask for a specific amount from TR or Jumbo - an open request for compensation that does not specify how much and for what is rarely successful.

One final general point, TR send an email confirmation of the BOOKING REQUEST very quickly after you make a booking on their website and there is a caveat on such a confirmation that this does not mean that the booking itself has actually been confirmed. This usually follows later along with not only TR's reference number but also the reference number from the actual provider. In any dealings with TR and Jumbo Tours and in the details you provide to Trading Standards and your credit card company, it is important that you send copies of the confirmation of the actual BOOKING and not just the confirmation of the BOOKING REQUEST. And as a general rule with TR it is important to check that the details in BOTH emails are identical.

SM

AVH it appeared that ETS the egyptian agent paid for 2 extra nights for us after we refused their transfer to alternative accommodation so all we owed was for 1 night.

My recent experience of dealing with Travel Republic has left me with a nasty taste in my mouth.

I booked with them for both my daughters and their families to stay at a specific hotel in Tenerife a couple of weeks ago. This hotel was chosen by my daughters after it had been recommended by a friend.

They were due to arrive on the Sunday. On the Friday afternoon, one of my daughters got an e-mail from Travel Republic saying that she was being moved to another hotel as the first one we booked was overbooked. My other daughter was staying at the original hotel. The new hotel that one of my daughters was being moved to was on the other side of the Island.

What followed can only be described as a nightmare.

By the time I got home from work on the Friday their customer services were already closed. I managed to get through to them on Saturday morning, but the person who dealt with overbooking problems wasn't working that day. I managed eventually to speak to an admin manager who promised me that she would sort something out for me. I spent an hour on my mobile phone to an 0845 number, so I'm dreading my mobile bill.

At this stage, I was even prepared to cancel the original hotel bookings and book another hotel altogether, as long as both families could stay together. However, this manager told me not to worry, I should phone back at 1pm and she would tell me what she'd managed to sort out.

When I phoned back (another 30 minutes on my mobile) she told me that she had managed to get both daughters back in the original hotel, so to ignore the previous days e-mail and just arrive at the hotel as planned.

Guess what happened next? Yes, they arrived at the hotel, but there was only one room available for 4 adults and 2 children.

The woman at Travel Republic had lied to me. I tried to contact the same woman on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of that week but as soon as I said who I was, she wasn't available. I was just fobbed off. I left my number for her to contact me, but no one has rung.

Never again with I use this company, not would I recommend them to anyone else

Out of interest, do you mind telling us the name of the hotel. I ask because a similar thing happened to our friends.

There's no excuse for them treating you in this way, with regards to ignoring your calls and being lied to. Can I just ask if both daughters' and families were booked on the same booking form. If so, it should have been treated as one booking and the party kept together. On the other hand if they were on two separate bookings, the travel company not obliged to keep them together. I speak from experience. My sis and I had 2 separate bookings (not with TR, may I add) on a holiday to Ibiza. When we arrived at the airport, we found out that there were overbooking issues and hubby and I had to move. When we explained that we were holidaying with sis and hubby, nothing was done as they weren't on our booking invoice, so we had to make the most of it. Happily, the holiday turned out fine eventhough we stayed in different properties.
Good Luck!

On the Friday afternoon, one of my daughters got an e-mail from Travel Republic saying that she was being moved to another hotel as the first one we booked was overbooked. My other daughter was staying at the original hotel.

Shirley raises a good point - presumably the first daughter was the lead name on a booking? But was she the lead name for the full booking or were these two separate bookings. If they weren't then how was Travel Republic supposed to know that this was 2 bookings for a single party? As Shirley says, in those cirumstances I don't think that they are under any legal obligation to try and keep them together - this is one of the pitfalls of making split bookings.

If they were on the same booking then the way the matter was handled, ie moving have the party only, was inexcusable and it is a very great shame that after the event TR have not responded to your phonecalls but in the end a recorded letter is often the only way to pursue these matters. However, it might be that TR in the first instance did act in good faith and that they were lied to by a hotel booking agent. Every time I have booked a room through TR it has actually been booked via a hotel or room agent rather than TR direct - you need to check the booking confirmation that you received from TR to check this out. It will clearly state the name of the actual supplier of the serivce near the top. In those circumstances TR will have needed to take this up with the supplier and it is possible that rather than lose the booking the agent gave them an assurance by them that it would be sorted - which is obviously wasn't.

SM

These were two separate bookings but were linked, so if you typed in the ref number for one booking, you also got the second one up on screen apparently? When I phoned on the Saturday, the first thing she said was "oh dear, I can see why you're ringing, this shouldn't have happened"

When I made the bookings, I made it clear that the second daughter had only decided to go so that she and her sister could spend the week together. According to Travel Republic at the time of booking, this was not a problem.

Not a lot of good if they're put in hotels 14km apart from each other.

If I had made a last minute booking I could have understood it, but I booked this 10 months ago. The other thing I couldn't understand, was why they didn't let us know until it the Friday afternoon when they were travelling on the Sunday? What would have happened if my daughter hadn't checked her e mails that afternoon?

What I did find unforgivable is the way that Travel Republic handled the situation by lying to me. As I said, if she had told the truth on the Saturday, I would have paid whatever was needed to make sure both daughters were together. She lied knowing that when they arrived on Sunday evening with their hubbies and toddlers in tow, only one of them would have a room, and that there would be no way of contacting anyone at Travel Republic until the following day.

I'm a regular traveller, usually to the USA, so am not naive enough to think that overbooking doesn't happen, but it's the way a company deals with problems like this that either makes them either good enough for me to go back and use them again, and tell everyone how good they are, or bad enough for me to tell as many people as I can about how rotten they are and how badly they handled a situation.

What I did find unforgivable is the way that Travel Republic handled the situation by lying to me. As I said, if she had told the truth on the Saturday, I would have paid whatever was needed to make sure both daughters were together. She lied knowing that when they arrived on Sunday evening with their hubbies and toddlers in tow, only one of them would have a room, and that there would be no way of contacting anyone at Travel Republic until the following day.

So are you saying that Travel Republic definitely did book the hotel direct and didn't use a 3rd party booking agent as is their usual practice and that you have proof of this? Unless you are absolutely sure about this I would suggest that you need to be a bit more circumspect - unless you have proof that she definitely knew that at the time she spoke to you that the problem hadn't been resolved and was lying to you as opposed to having been lied to herself by a 3rd party booking agent, then you are laying yourself open to being potentially sued yourself. As I said before, even if this is what happened it doesn't excuse the way they behaved once it became clear that the problem still hadn't been resolved and as your contract was with TR so they did need to sort it out and should make an offer of compensation for the inconvenience and any additonal costs incurred regardless of whose fault this mismanagement of the booking was. But accusing them of willfuly lying without any proof isn't going to help the negotiations.

SM

I have no idea how Travel republic booked the rooms. Whether they used a booking agent or not is not my problem.
As far as I'm concerned, I booked the rooms with them, the buck stops with them. They were happy enough to take my money. If it's them who were lied to then they shouldn't be dealing with the company who lied to them.

On the Saturday afternoon I was promised that the problem was sorted out, it wasn't, then the woman who'd promised me that is was sorted would not take my calls the following week, leaving me to draw my own conclusions as to who was lying.

I'm sorry, but I paid good money for a service that was lacking. From what I've read on this forum and various other travel forums over the years so have many more people.

I'm not interested in negotiations with Travel republic. There isn't anything they could do to make things right now. I don't see any point in spending the next year exchanging letters with them, only to be offered a token compensation.

I didn't come on here asking for advice, I came on to let other would be customers know how I was treated by this company

As a follow up I think people need to know this:
ABTA say

Whilst your travel agent is a member of ABTA, their job was to act as an agent only by passing your booking on to the company with whom you have your contract. The terms and conditions of your booking will confirm that your contract is not with the agent that you paid, but with the principle (the tour operator or supplier) Unfortunately that company (Jumbo Tours) is not a member. This means that our hands are tied as we have no jurisdiction over non ABTA members.

Since by their own admission Travel Republic and GreatLateDeals use Jumbo Tours a "great deal" any booking you make with them is NOT covered by ABTA or UK rules and regulations. Therefore the ABTA sign printed and shown on all their correspondence and websites is just about useless. I am pursuing the claim through the small claims court.