Does anyone know our rights and how we can get closer to the compensation we should be paid for the extreme stress this caused us?

Simple answer is you have no rights - Yes Virgin booked you elsewhere to the place you wished to go (one problem with booking so far in front they may not be contracted when it comes time to deliver) but then you yourself cancelled. You are now in the position that you can try to negotiate with Virgin - You have refused a a higher offer albeit in vouchers - or take legal advice/action. Either way there is no guarantee that you will win. Stress and an abcess mmm - I can make one suggestion that may assist.

HT have teamed up with Simpson Millar LLP Solicitors who are a national law firm. If you click on the link below you will be able to find more information. They have already helped many HT members.

http://www.holidaytruths.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=149252

fwh

I would have thought that you would have been able to claim the money back from your insurance on production of a 'not fit to fly' certificate.

They changed it without telling us to an island with no house reef!

But they didn't - are you not saying that they did tell you which resort you'd been booked into on the invoice for the new dates but that you didn't notice it was wrong and only realised this once you contacted the hotel you were first booked into?

New holiday booked - carefully checked dates, times etc but now I no longer had the brochure in front of me. I thought it was right until 2 weeks before holiday I wrote to the island to arrange champagne and flowers on arrival as celebration. Island wrote back and said we weren't booked there. Virgin actually changed the holiday island without telling us to one with a very similar name Chayaa Lagoon instead of Chayaa Reef, which had an extremely different make up, so changed the holiday entirely.

The names are very similar and this could have been a genuine error - after all you didn't notice it was wrong yourself until two weeks before you were going but whether it was an error or intentional Virgin could have taken the line that you were told which hotel/island you were booked into when they sent the revised invoice for the new dates and that you should have cheched this when it was first sent to you and contacted them at that stage. In the circumstances, personallly, I'd be relieved that I as things turned out, I had a legitimate reason for cancelling and being able to claim against my insurance whilst at the same time kicking myself for not noticing this earlier and resolving to make sure that next time I checked absolutely everything against the brochure details.

If Virgin had changed the hotel at short notice then I think that you would have a case for arguing for compensation but I'm doubtful that you have in these circumstances. Given the time that had elapsed between you receiving the invoice and noticing the error I think that it will be difficult to argue that it was entirely their fault because most invoices and booking confirmations do put a time limit on you getting back to them to rectify any errrors.

SM

You wont be entitled to any compensation.
You got your money back from the insurance, so why would they pay compensation.

Are you saying that the paperwork for the rebooked holiday on the correct dates named the accommodation as Chayaa Reef - and then the final confirmation said Chayaa Lagoon??
If so, you might have had a case for compensation if you had actually gone on the holiday...but as you didn't go then I really can't see a successful case.
If the paperwork named the Chayaa Lagoon all the way thru' ..then,I'm sorry ,its your fault anyway for not checking the paperwork properly.

Hi Elle
Can you please clarify a couple of things:
Did you receive a full refund from your travel insurance company for cancellation due to illness? This is not clear from your original post.

When you booked 15 months before departure, did you receive any paperwork (confirmation etc) from Virgin with the wrong departure date on it? i.e. they made a mistake but you failed to pick up on it.

Did the new paperwork (presumably sent 13 months before the correct departure date) state the hotel would be Chayaa Lagoon instead of Chayaa Reef? i.e. they did 'tell' you (maybe not in so many words) that there was a change in hotel but you failed to pick up on it.

Another 1 post wonder? Or too early to tell?

Possibly the answers are not what the OP wanted to hear?

IMHO there is an element of personal responsibility that appears to be missing. Perhaps Virgin did make a genuine error but we should all check our paperwork to make sure we are happy the details are correct. I wouldn't pay a credit card bill without checking the details are correct, a holiday costing several thousand pounds is no different.

I think there are some points/questions raised by HT members that the OP should clarify but I also think in fairness we should give the OP a little while longer to reply - she only posted Friday late afternoon.

Possibly the answers are not what the OP wanted to hear?

The OP hasn't been back to read any of them - looks as if they found HT, registered and posted and then haven't seen any of the replies because they haven't visited HT since that first post. I wonder whether some first time posters assume that there are loads of members on-line all the time and when they don't get an immediate response lose interest and don't come back later to check if somebody had replied later?

Even though ElleBee said they we looking for advice, perhaps they just needed to have a rant and get it off their chest and once that was done they felt better and saw no need to return?

SM

According to the log they Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:52 pm - Last visited: Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:24 pm So perhaps the idea that there are always people online just waiting to answer the question - just like a call centre - might not be far from the truth. Elsewhere we discuss other forums and their merits. Perhaps they always have people hanging around just waiting to answer. HT as we know is not like that. Dependent upon the question it might be several days before a member with the right answer will visit and be able to answer. Pity really as whilst the answer given is not always what some might like to hear it will be accurate and unbiased.

There is of course another possibility - the OP appreciates that it might be a few days and so is giving us chance to answer.

fwh

Did ElleBee ever read these repliesI wonder?

Did ElleBee ever read these replies I wonder?

No! They are yet another to be awarded the "One Post Wonder" accolade. Post a question but never come back to read the answers. Sometimes wonder why we bother.

fwh

we bother because most of us are trying to be helpful.

just a suggestion, but if anyone is curious as to why someone has not responded why not try and PM them!

they may simply have found us and forgotten to bookmark this site and can't find their way back.
possibly they have forgotten their password and read the responses as a guest.
maybe after coming back as a guest they did not like the responses they saw.
maybe they were unhappy that their initial post had to wait Mods approval -i think this is still the procedue.
maybe........

a PM, with a link to their post, may be all that's needed as they may then get an alert in their e-mail account.

I'd say you're right in the fact that they came back as guest and read the responses!

Hi All,

So sorry that I didn't come back to read the responses to my questions. The fact was exactly as one of the people who answered suggested. I wrote the question, and for that day kept the window open so could check back to see if there were any answers. Then unfortunately, I closed the window and I also had an Apple lesson the following day and as part of that lesson we cleared the history in my browser. So I had no idea how to get back again.

I have just received a private message to my question so a mail was sent to me which enabled me to find the post again.

Thank you all for your responses and taking the time to give your opinions.

Update to the problem:- I gave up arguing with Virgin and accepted their £50 a head 'broacher compensation' which covered our policy excess on our travel insurance. I figured that I could continue to feel angry about the whole thing, but the only person that would hurt would be ME, not Virgin who made the error (or sneaky change because they were no longer using that hotel - I'll never know which it was). The past can only affect you if you ALLOW it to, I decided to move on, although I will be affected by the past in as much as I won't use Virgin ever again.

There was a further altercation with them when I went through my credit card statements and stumbled across the original amount I paid to them, and realised that the cancellation invoice they gave me was £1,400 short of what I'd originally paid. I asked them for an amended cancellation invoice so I could claim the missing £1,400 from my travel insurance and then they issued an incorrect cancellation invoice again, because this time they had deducted the £100 compensation they gave me from the invoice total. That £100 was to cover no end of phone calls and one hell of a lot of tears!!. So they eventually allowed me to claim an extra £1,300 from the holiday insurance company and Virgin paid the £100 discrepancy directly to my bank. Net result - the booking of the holiday cost me nothing but 15 months of looking forward to something and lots of tears and anxiety when I found out they'd booked it wrong.

Update on the tooth... thank goodness I did cancel the holiday, I was tempted to go against the advice of the dentist and go anyway... I would have been in a right state had I done that as I spent a lot of the 2 weeks when I would have been away, sitting in the dentist chair and 5 lots of anti-biotics later I still have a hole through the centre of my tooth which can't be filled or capped as the infection is not cleared (6 months later) and has to be left to heal from the inside out.

Answers to your comments:- (I'll try and remember them all).

1. Re booking the wrong year initially. Yes, I must take my part of the blame too because I didn't check the booking carefully enough. Because the first booking was so far in advance I didn't notice the year was wrong. I suppose I didn't expect when we've talked for over an hour on the phone about when exactly the holiday was, and the fact that it was more than a year away, and myself and the Virgin employee had gone through the diary together, and many times the date was spoken (correctly) that when the invoice came, the date would be a year out and the holiday would be just 3 months from the date it was booked. She obviously made a typo because she was well aware of the actual date and I was so busy checking the day, month and hour that I didn't realise the year was wrong. But no harm done on that front as it was a year in advance and we were able (I thought) to secure the same holiday a year later.

2. Re booking the wrong hotel/island. Yes, I must take my part of the blame for the incorrect hotel on the second invoice too. In hindsight I suppose I should have gone back down to the travel agent and picked up another brochure to remind myself of the FULL name of the hotel. But by the time they rebooked the holiday in the correct year it was 6 months from my original booking and I had spent 6 months saying I was going to the Chaaya Reef, and the new invoice came stating I was going to the Chaaya Reef Lagoon. As I had told them I wanted EXACTLY the SAME hotels and flights, just a year later, and they had the added advantage of the paperwork sitting in front of them with the exact name of the hotel/island, I think the average person would assume that they would get it right and not book an entirely different island. I was concerned that they would get the dates or the times wrong, but I didn't think for one minute they would get the island wrong, so when I saw the name I'd been saying for 6 months on the invoice, I assumed it was the same hotel. Had I had a brochure infront of me, I might have noticed the difference. It's a bit like if you had always said that you drank in The Swan, not knowing there were two The Swan's but one had the word 'Revived' after the name... you would be forgiven for waiting in The Swan for a friend and they were in The Swan Revived (as is the case in Milton Keynes)

3. Someone asked why I should receive compensation because I had been able to claim back on my travel insurance. Well I will have lost the excess on my holiday insurance, plus the premium will go up next year no doubt. Plus I spent hours on the phone to them trying to sort it out, phone calls cost money, not that I'm particularly bothered about that, but these phone calls were extremely stressful, and at the time before I had the tooth abscess I had hard decisions to make as to whether or not I should go on a holiday I would hate, or lose £4,500 because Virgin booking the wrong holiday would not be grounds enough to claim on the holiday insurance. So YES... I think I should be entitled to some compensation for Virgin making the mistake and causing me a LOT of stress and causing a LOT of tears.... not to mention tension between me and my new husband as he would have been OK on that island as he dives as well as snorkels so he would still be able to dive. I however don't dive, and also don't like sitting around on sunbeds so I would have been extremely unhappy there, and angry all the time that I should have been at an island with a house reef where I would be as happy as larry, face down bum up for the entire holiday. I dislike sitting on sunbeds so much that when I went to Mauritius it was day 9 of a 10 day holiday when I said "we really ought to sit on a sunbed even if only to say we have"... I stayed on there for 15 minutes. On a Maldivian island there is little else to do than to sit on a sunbed if there is no coral to watch the fish on. I feel my belief that I should be entitled to compensation is justified.

I can't remember any more of the questions, but thanks all for taking the time to answer me.
ElleBee

Thanks for coming back with an update. It is appreciated.

luci

Many thanks ElleBee for your update.
I hope your tooth is much better now x