Mary Gillatt

Review of Cruise1st UK

The star is for the showroom - customer services o...

The star is for the showroom - customer services on the other hand .........!

What travel company in this day and age don't have customer service on Saturday or Sunday?
Why can't the "sales advisor" deal with a cancellation.?
Why did it take 3 visits to the store to cancel a holiday?

I.e. Tuesday explained that we were considering cancelling / amending our booking ( told we couldn't cancel in store, only their ' service team' can do this ) so a call was booked for the same day 'but it might be tomorrow as they're very busy right now". I checked the contact numbers they had were correct and waited, and waited, and .................zzzzzzz

By Sunday, no call received, so visited the store again, told the sales person we wanted to cancel, told to take a seat, ( no suggestion of surprise) until I stopped him mid sentence to decline the offer of a call from customer service the following day "they don't work weekends" he said. As he was going on holiday the following day (not on a cruise -I did ask !). He typed up a sentence as a cancellation confirmation which I signed and he passed it to a colleague who would "make sure we got a call first thing in the morning"

Wednesday - still no call, so another visit - the same staff member insisted she'd handed the document in first thing on Monday morning and was assured someone would call me. She then went through the door into customer services, returned with the name of a staff member who would ring me " the paper is on the top of her pile - she's been on annual leave". When I asked if there was only 1 member of staff dealing with cancellations, she replied "yes" - what a good job she wasn't on maternity leave! This was 10.30am. Heaven help those under me in the 'pile' because the call eventually came at 3.pm. Why the person couldn't have come through the door into the store, deal with the issue and get back to her desk is beyond me.

At no point did anyone suggest an alternative date/ship/itinerary, discuss any options. I fully understood that I would forfeit the deposit etc, that wasn't the issue. The good thing to come out of this is that our decision to cancel was the right one - I would certainly not use Cruise 1st in the future, nor would I recommend them.