Not me changing them, but the travel agent/flight operators !
first off let me explain what a holiday involves for the average person (ie not super rich people with rich families and do when you want jobs)
I work all year round, putting in extra days whenever I can, as does my other half so we can save up a lump of money to pay for a holiday. Its what drives us on all year, its a break from work and mundane day in day out, it recharges out batteries. So we've worked hard to get one and need one after all that work.
Second let me explain work or at least the part involved with holidays - I don't get set holidays, neither does my other half which might sound great but it is far from it. We have to beg and plead to get holidays near the time when we want them. Trying to get both our companies to give us a couple of weeks in the periods where everyone wants holidays is almost impossible and means a lot of adjusting and booking months before needed. Once the threshold of people are off in any given period you can't have them. Even if you wanted just a week but Wednesday had been booked off by a few people for (dental appointments, taking kids to something etc) you couldn't have the week off.... So what I'm saying is the holiday time isn't flexible... its almost impossible to change them, rebook or extend them...
Right back to booking a holiday, our next holiday has been booked for well over a year and we are bringing two of our young grandchildren with us so we had to sort out the time they could go with our Daughter (she is pregnant and won't be flying which is why we are taking them). We had to book the time off from work to fit that period as near as we could and we had to choose decent flight times so we aren't keeping the children up at all hours. This we managed to do so there normal routine will be disturbed as little as possible, with our flight meaning we would get into resort at about 10:30-11:30 (we even booked taxi transfers into resort to keep the times down).
All was going well until an email a couple of weeks ago saying the flight times had been changed, so now its 2 hours later, so getting into resort at maybe 1:30am with two young children.
Now I'm not really happy about it, but what can I do ? They aren't going to give me another flight back when it should have been, at best I could cancel the holiday and get me money back, but as I've explained at the start there is no way of getting another holiday in the time slot and no way we could re-work our holiday times at work or with the children. It would ruin our year, would upset us and really really upset the children....
why are they allowed to do this ? why isn't something in place like massive fines to the airline/agents to make them think twice about changing flight times ? A big part of book it is around good flight times, we have even paid to change to different flights when booking, so how can they simply change it a few weeks before ?
I think something should be done about the whole industry concerning this ? Is it just me ?
If your TV was broken just before the final of Britains got talent/fa cup/F1 final race and you went around half a dozen shops in town looking for one who could deliver by this afternoon, paid your money and went home waiting for the tv to arrive then get a phone call saying its going to be tomorrow morning, you would go balistic... ! Why has nothing been put in place to stop this sort of practice in the holiday industry ?
. maybe it is time for someone to start campaigning about this.
