ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

We’ve booked our holidays for 2009. For the first time since our honeymoon, myself and the GLW will be heading for pastures abroad. We’re taking the kids to the location of our 2002 honeymoon — we’re off to Corfu again.

In many ways, it’s an ideal holiday location for us. It’s small, and while parts of it can be very busy (although not in the Ibiza style), we’re in a small hotel, described as being best suited for either “couples or families with small children”. Which suits us just fine.

My wife and I both love the Greek islands, and we’re somewhat fans of Greek cuisine: mezé, dolmades, feta cheese, olives, lamb Kleftiko, moussaka and so on. Mmm. (Hang on a moment while I mop up the drool from my keyboard).

Also, ours kids have been exposed to a wide variety of cuisines already: they’ve already had Greek, Italian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese (including sushi), Indian, Mexican, and probably several others I can’t remember off-hand, so we already know that they aren’t afraid to try new foodstuffs. Although some of their combinations are perhaps a little too outré for me: at the Japanese restaurant, SWP experimented by dipping a piece of squid in his ice cream and then sucking the ice cream off it…

We’re hoping we can maybe get in touch with Captain Ed to see if it’s possible to arrange a trip on the Natasha again (his website is still going, so here’s hoping he’s still in Corfu in 2009, as he was responsible for the single best day of our honeymoon). If you are planning to go to Corfu, try to get in touch with Captain Ed and have a boat trip with him. It was bloody fantastic and five years later we’re desperate to go back…

We loved Corfu. We loved the island, we loved the people, and we’re delighted to be taking the kids back. We got all the brochures from Thompson, found a lovely holiday that we wanted to go on: bed and breakfast in a hotel, total price we estimated at around £2200.

Only when we got to Thompson and spoke to the assistant, and she brought the details up on screen, it had suddenly become £3300. We both resented the idea of paying 50% more for seemingly no good reason, and as the assistant then was remarkably unhelpful — not willing to look up any other options for us (other hotels, other resorts etc — she simply advised us to “go away and try and find somewhere with free child places”. Well, excuse me, but isn’t it her job to help?), nor was she willing to look into prices for a disneyland trip for us “because she would have to phone them”, we decided to take our custom elsewhere.

This miserable and particularly unhelpful shop assistant was to be found in the Gateshead Metro Centre branch of Thompson (top floor, near the cinema). I wouldn’t have specifically mentioned it, only I spent half an hour trying to complain about it on the Thompson website unsuccessfully as they seem unwilling to provide an email address (or a contact form that works), so if they are going to be that unhelpful to me, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to mention it.

Particularly when in contrast the assistant in Thomas Cook in the metrocentre was helpful: we told him we wanted to go to Corfu from Newcastle, we told him the dates we wanted to go, we told him we wanted bed & breakfast or half-board, and he came out with a list of holidays, at various prices, and showed us all the relevant hotels in the brochure. He was also able — without having to phone anyone — to provide the details about Disneyland Paris that we were looking for, despite the fact that we had told him (and not the unpleasant Thompson lady) that we wouldn’t be booking that yet.

So we booked the holiday with Thomas Cook. Where we in fact got a better holiday than we had originally expected (half board rather than bed and breakfast, location we preferred, family room, extra baggage allowances) for a grand total of around £2250, all in.

Can anyone else see why I’d be holding up the Thompson example as poor customer service and the Thomas Cook one as good customer service?

But, griping aside, we’re delighted to be heading back to our honeymoon island… now all we need to do is to teach the kids to swim and to speak Greek…

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Life, The Pickards, Travel. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.