Chronic complainers banned from making holiday bookings

Serial travel complainers, who are experienced at getting travel operators to refund their money, are about to be shut out by the largest holiday firm in Britain, which has announced that it will blacklist troublesome customers.

TUI Travel, the parent of both Thomson and First Choice, serves over seven million British holidaymakers annually, and has said that it will ban chronic complainers from making holiday bookings.

“We’re only talking about a tiny percentage of customers who are persistent troublemakers,” said the customer director of the firm, Tim Williamson, “but we’re keeping a list of them. If they try to book another trip, they’ll be told that we are unable to meet their expectations. There’s always been a philosophy that the customer is right, but these people will never be happy.”

The company declined to reveal the amount it refunded each year to customers who lodged complaints. “So they complain and, if we accept we are in the wrong, we settle and they get next year’s holiday free,” he added.

Andy Williams, a holiday rep who has worked in Mediterranean resorts for over 10 years, noted that “whingers” were common: “I had a client who went berserk because he found a bare wire in his apartment. The mains cable had been ripped from the wall and he was quoting health-and-safety law, but nobody had complained previously.

Williams added: “We couldn’t prove whether this gentleman had done it, but a colleague recognised him as someone who’d made a similar complaint last year.”

Thanks to www.timesonline.co.uk for the quotes above, for more information about this article please visit their website.

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