welcome!

you seem to be handling this quite calmly which is always helpful.

I'm guessing that LowCost provided the holiday as a dynamic package putting together bought in components whilst acting as your agent as the standard phrase goes. That lets them off the hook for some problems, like the original complaint about the hotel.

But it doesn't get them out of the trouble they caused by showing your complaint to the hotel staff, that would have been bad in the UK but in somewhere as volatile as Egypt currently is it was possibly dangerous.

Are you saying they have made a written offer of compensation? And does the offer mean that some nights will have worked out to be completely free? Normally we see offers to refund the original OR the replacement but not both. If that's the case then I would say this is a fair offer, the "free" nights at the second hotel could be considered as compensation for the hassle at the first and the refund of the first because of the poor quality might be more than they need to offer if I'm right about them acting as your agent. If this is what they are offering then it's not a bad offer, inadvertently the lack of phone numbers means you haven't run up the usual huge phone bill we usually have to add on! Did you have any signficant costs in accessing email from Egypt?

As for delays in correspondence, unfortunately that is industry standard. If the answer in less than 28 days you're doing well.

just one last thing, the offer is in money not vouchers??

Might it be worth investigating if the Small Claims Court might not be able to award a judgement against LowCostHolidays?

Thank you both for your reply.

The deal I got was one were you choose flights and hotel etc. seperately and they make it a package (not sure of the correct term for this type of holiday) which is what I think you've suggested.

They have indeed made a written offer. They've just said that they'll reimburse us the full amount for the second hotel and as a "gesture of goodwill" (ex-gratia) they will refund us for the whole two-weeks at the first hotel, but as there was no issue with flights, they can't pay that money back, which is annoying but understandable.

I agree we got off lightly with the lack of phone numbers and our access to the internet was relatively cheap so we weren't put out of pocket in that regard. But our main loss in money was having to pay for our own food as the hotel's AI was shabby and gave us food poisoning, which they say they've acknowledged in their offer. They said they'll hope it will go some way to cover our expenses for meals, taxis, tips etc. - that we had to pay for after leaving the original hotel.

They said they will credit the full amount to my bank card should I accept their offer, so it will be in cash.

We did have a truly horrific ordeal while we were there which I went into great detail in my letters to them, all of which I had evidence to back up (we'd written journals whilst there as well, a very good thing to do apparently if you run into trouble). The worst of which was dodgy treatment from their so-called expert masseur which left me badly hurt, the bar manager threatening to cut me up into little pieces and run of with my partner, and us having to do a runner at 3 in the morning from the hotel while the security guards were physically trying to stop us!

A Small Claims Court might be an idea but as I've done this all off my own back so far and just want it over and done with, I might be better taking the offer...

All the best, Graeme.

sounds like they are doing the "your agent" type arrangements. This limits the liablity for what the hotel does.

"gesture of goodwill" is a means of protecting themselves from future claims - as long as you get the money they can call it what they want! I wouldn't be certain of getting any more through court action so I think I'd take their offer.

PLEASE READ. The following describes my experience with this incompetent agency. I wrote this mail to lowcostholidays and I've never received an answer:

Dear Lowcostholidays,

Me and my boyfriend wanted to enjoy some days together in a beautiful island. As we are a student and a young worker, we were searching for cheap holidays. Through the internet, we found your agency and were very pleased in the great proposals you offer. We booked a hotel together with a flight on the 21st of July (see attached PDF file). We introduced the credit card data (VISA Credit Card) and everything seemed to work out fine.

The day after, on the 22nd of July, we received an email saying that something went wrong with the reservations. We were firstly surprised to see that what was supposed to be a "customised" email contained sentences like: "Thank you for choosing lowcostholidays for your next holidays to xxxxxxxxxxx". It is not nice to receive generic emails from the agency in which you have relied giving nearly half of the salary of the month, but we thought it was not so important. Following this sentence, it came another one saying "After having left a voice message in your voice mailbox, we contact you to make you aware that the flights that you have chosen have not completed their booking process". There comes the second surprise, as there was no voice message at all in our inbox. In fact, there was no sign that you had tried to contact us - not even a missed call. But OK, we were so excited about the great plans that you offered that we decided to carry on and contact you in order to get everything solved as soon as possible. So we did it.

At 9:14 CET we try to reach you for the first time through your 902 telephone service, which was the one indicated in your email. Let us highlight that 902 calls are not covered by flat rates and have their own special tariff. After 3 minutes on hold, we decided to hang up the call and try again later on. At 9:20 CET we tried again on the same line with a 6 minutes call. Your agent Margarita kindly responded us and informed us that the flight booking had not successfully finished as the prices had increased in the last minute by 74 €. There comes the first disappointment: how can this happen? We supposed that when we clicked the "Buy" button and providing our credit card data we were accepting to buy something at certain conditions. It looked that it was not like that - but it was definitely not our fault!

As we needed to think about it, we said to Margarita that we would call later to confirm that we wanted to go ahead with the reservation with the extra-cost.

At 11:01 CET we receive a call from an English phone number (+44 prefix) from a spanish speaking man who does not identify himself with his name (afterwards we would realize that his name was likely Peter). Let us highlight again that receiving phone calls from England implies an extra cost when these calls are received by a spanish phone provider. We thought "let's try to get this solved as quickly as possible as these calls are going to be really expensive". During this 10 minutes call, your colleague informs us that the flights price has increased by something over 100 €. We kindly explain to him that this was not possible as his colleague Margarita had previously informed that the total price of the reservation had increased by 74 €. He put our call on hold and after some minutes he confirmed to us that the total amount had "only" increased 74 € as lowcostholidays would assume the rest of the cost as it had not been our fault. After receiving this "nice message" we were decided to pay this extra amount and then be relaxed as we would have our holiday plans perfectly fixed. We indicated to your colleague that we wanted to assume these extra 74 € so he could call us later to give to him our credit card details again (we did not have our credit card in hands at that moment).

This call was never received. At approximately 12 CET, we called from an office number to the english phone number that had previously contacted us (as the 902 calls were getting expensive). This call lasted around 10 minutes (apologies, of the exact duration of this call, we do not have records). This call was responded by an english speaking lady, whose name we did not write down and to whom we requested to pass our call to Margarita or any other spanish speaking colleague. She said they were all busy but she would send a desk email to let them know that they had to call us as soon as they were free. This call was never received - again!

So at 13:57 CET we call again to the 902 number for a 14 minutes duration call. This call, attented by Margarita starts with a conversation in which we provided our credit card details again - let us higlight that this credit card was the one used for the payment of the apartment the day before.
As she was having some trouble when introducing the credit card data she put us on hold for something like 10 minutes (!!!) - 10 minutes in the 902 line we were paying!
As we have other things to do apart from resolving problems that we have not created, we had to give up and hang up the phone and call again later.

That is the reason why at 15:27 CET we contact again Margarita (through your 902 service) and confirm whether this hour and a half had been enough to resolve the problem with our payment. This call lasted 12 minutes and again the problem was not solved!

At 15:49 CET we tried to reach Margarita again through the 902 line, but after 4 minutes of listening to really nice music we thought it was better to hang up and try to call later again.
Exactly the same happened at 15:59 CET with a 52 seconds duration call (we were already a bit tired of trying to contact you with no success).

Finally at 16:54 we called you again, not excited at all about the plans, service and customer care you offered, we decided to call for the last time. As your colleague Margarita kept saying that the credit card was not valid (again - the same credit card was used paying the apartment the day before and I can assure you that it was covered), we decided to cancel all the plans we had previously contracted with you! This call lasted 4 minutes.

That was the end of the nightmare.
Margarita was nice and kind at all the time, but for some reason she was not able to solve our problems.
We can tell you that we are really disappointed and we have lost any confidence we may had in your agency!
But this is not the only thing we have lost, apart from our plans we have wasted approx. more than ONE HOUR of working time trying to solve a problem that was not caused by us!

We are really excited to see what is the translation of these, more than ONE HOUR, calls to the 902 service line into minutes will be.

If you have time, we encourage you to listen to any of these conversations as they are all recorded.
As you will realise that you have not properly dealt with this issue, causing a cost to us for something we have not provoked, we request you to reimburse these associated expenses.

And what was the response?

ATB,J.

Do you know if there is such a complaints procedure in place when a voucher code doesnt work? We are trying to retroactively claim. The code was from here http://www.promovouchers.co.uk/lowcostholidays/ thankyou