All reviews of David S
Review about: Oliver's Travels
Attempted Villa Rental
BEWARE – Oliver’s Travels 'book with confidence' is a scam and that is not all. They'll take money BUT charge extra on alternative dates if needed. Important: they will not refund, only give credit to your account. Also, they've just cancelled this year’s booking AFTER emailing us that it was CONFIRMED and FULLY PAID for. Oliver’s Travels demanded another £950 to keep the reservation! They absolutely refuse to refund us.
Oliver’s Travels are not ABTA registered. It is now obvious why.
For those interested, here is a more complete description (however, I’d save time if I were you and just go elsewhere): Anyway, last year we made our booking and paid our deposit. When the time came to pay the remaining amount things were obviously getting worse with regards to Covid so we contacted Oliver’s Travels to ask what would happen if government restrictions meant the booking had to be cancelled. At this point we said we would rather forfeit our deposit than pay the extra and lose it. Oliver’s Travels assured us (in writing) that their guarantee meant that we would not forfeit any of the costs should this happen. We let our booking stand and paid the final amount. Unfortunately restrictions on travel were put in place and the booking had to be cancelled. We requested exactly the same dates 12 months later but were told it would be another £454 - So much for the not costing us extra! A blatant breach of alternative dates being offered ‘at no extra cost’.
To keep it brief(!), our request for a full refund was DENIED (despite being against the law) but we received a credit note on our account. OK, not happy with that but with the state of the world we reasoned that there were bigger issues to worry about.
So, moving on to this year. Being forced to use Oliver’s Travels again (as they have our money), we just booked our Autumn property and, importantly, RECEIVED CONFIRMATION that it was booked and FULLY PAID for. However, later that day we received another email informing us that the booking had been cancelled and we were required to pay an extra £950 if we wanted to keep it! (not an unusual occurrence it would seem) This then took the reservation to way more than exactly the same booking available elsewhere; which to be fair, when this was pointed out they then said they would price match... along with another £85 added on! Er, that is not a price match!
OK, while I'm here... Also, make sure you thoroughly read their rather bizarre T&Cs before any bookings, as they will readily refer to them! They basically deny any responsibility for anything! To avoid refunds they claim all bookings are made directly with the owners and they are NOT an agent! A bit odd as we pay Oliver’s Travels (confirmed on Credit Card bill) and they hold our money; this is in their ‘Agency Terms and Conditions’. I kid you not! I think they need to look up the term ’agent’.
Also, although there are many more T&Cs points I could raise here, throughout their site you will see “Oliver’s Travels recommended properties”, indeed they even have a nice laurel leaf logo to highlight some of these along with dedicated top property pages and even, “…we hand select our properties and only recommend places we love ourselves”. However, taken directly from their T&C’s, “We do not endorse or recommend any of the properties on our site.”… Hmmm – There are many more strange and contradictory aspects of their T&Cs. Dishonest.
To summarise:
Oliver’s Travels incompetence is outstanding and to compound this we now have zero trust in anything they say. They will deny any wrongdoing and wriggle out of any reasonable discussion.
They continue to refuse a refund. That’s all l am asking for as they cannot fulfil their obligations, which, after all of these issues I do not believe is an unreasonable request.
Absolutely fed up with excuses.
I completely stand by every single word I have said here and have written evidence.
Not sure how they continue to get away with it...
THIS IS ILLEGAL PRACTICE UNDER UK LAW:
Search for: "Why your travel company won’t refund your holiday" - find thetraveljournalist article for a clear explanation of why.
Shocking - AVOID
Admin: Please remove - this has now been resolved