We have just returned from a wonderful holiday in Switzerland, where did the Swiss Glacier Rail Tour which was a 3 resort stay in Grindelwald, Zermatt and Davos. The hotels were all excellent, the train journeys exceptional and the Glacier Express stunning. Switzerland is a beautiful Country, very clean, very high standards although very expensive. 1.5 litres (3 separate bottles) of wine cost us £45
However now to the not so good. Thomsons Customer care and service is absolutely dire!! We had problems prior to departure with Thomsons. The first problems was with fly/rail luggage voucher which operates in Switzerland. (Excellent system by the way which means you check your bag in at the airport and it you next see it at your hotel). Anyway Thomsons were wanting to charge us £19pp for this service yet their brochure said it was included. After numerous calls, even one of their staff had never heard of fly/rail so I referred him to the relevant page in the brochure, they eventually refunded us.
Second problem was on the Glacier Express. It advises you in Thomsons brochure if you want lunch, you need to book this at the time of booking the holiday, which we did when we booked last October. When we got the confirmation through, no mention of lunch so I sent an email via my TA and got email confirmation back that lunch had been booked. When the tickets came through, still no mention of lunch. Emailled Thomsons, and again got another email confirmation advising lunch has been booked. Well you have guessed it, we found out the day before we were due to travel the Glacier Express, no lunch had been booked!!!
Third problem. We were flying KLM via Amsterdam. When we received our tickets the covering letter from our TA advised that we did not need to confirm our outbound flights but our return flights must be confirmed 72 hours prior to departure, with either KLM or Thomsons rep. Spoke to Thomson rep 72 hours before. She said she has never heard of that and that they are probably scaremongering. She said she would email her reservations and get back to us. I chased her next day and she said no need to confirm flights. Now I have worked as a TA and I know KLM are notorious for overbooking. So off we go to Zurich Airport, checked in at 15.45 for 17.55 flight to AMS and 21.20 flight to ABZ only to be told there was only 1 seat left on the ABZ flight!!! Now you can imagine what happened next
We were told there was nothing they could do in Zurich and we would need to wait until we got to AMS. So a very stressful flight to AMS. We were told to go to the transfer desk which we did and the very unhelpful female at KLM told us there was nothing she could do and we would need to wait until the gate opened and that the flight was overbooked!!!! Well to cut the long story short after alot of stress, shouting, crying etc we eventually got our other seat 30 mins before the flight was due to leave. Hubby sitting on one end of plane and me at the other which I was NOT happy about as I am a nervous flyer. So if Thomsons had done what we instructed, everything would have been fine.Other minor points, the timetables they sent out with train details were incorrect and had been aligned incorrectly so it looked like it only took you six minutes to travel between 2 stations that were about 1 hour apart!!! Took some working out that one!! We also met another group of unhappy Thomsons people who were put on a train by the rep at Zurich, which needed 1 change to get to their destination in Zermatt. They arrived at the first station only to find out that there were no more trains to Zermatt, no buses either. They were stranded, in the evening about 2 hours away from Zermatt!!!. Someone in the group spoke to a bus driver who very kindly arranged another bus to come and pick them all up and took them to Zermatt free of charge!!!!
Needless to say I have written a complaint letter to Thomsons and I will NEVER use or recommend them. Likewise their sister company Crystal who we had problems with a couple of years ago. Its Inghams for us in future. Amazing how many people we met who had travelled with Inghams and nobody had a bad word to say about them.
Sorry for the long rant, but if just thought I would share our experience.
