Tracy, the manager of Select in Hull, had promised to call me back at
10am today. I called about 11am, after giving her heaps of time. She was
in a meeting. I insited on them dragging her out of that meeting, and
she said that she'd spoken to Kate since then, and Michelle had spoken
to her twice. She considered I was being unreasonable expecting her to
call at a pre-arranged time since someone else had spoken to someone
else meanwhile. The phone call ended with her refusing to speak to me
again, and saying that she didn't care about me - Kate was her client,
and she had no responsibility towards me. She gave me her boss's phone
number, but said she was in a 'crisis budget meeting' and wouldn't be
available all day.
Kate and I talked for a bit about our options and decided that our
experience with Select up to this point meant that we didn't trust them
- and we hadn't received any written response to emails. The Hull office
still hadn't resolved issues like tax numbers (required for payment) -
which the brochure says they will do, and were very unreliable at
returning calls and representing Kate's interests. They treated us like
a problem to be swept under the carpet at every opportunity.
We decided to drop Select, cut our holiday short, and keep travelling.
Of course we had to wait up late to arrange things with the travel agent
in Australia, but apart from that, all that was lost was a Ryanair
flight. They're cheap. It turns out we can only use half our Britrail
pass (not so cheap) because of the shorter time. That sucks.
We've now booked a flight that will arrive back on the 31st October -
all the times are exactly the same (see website).
Catherine Delaney (Select's International Manager) called to find out
what was going on. At this stage all we wanted was compensation for our
wasted week and the expenses we'd incurred trying to work with Select.
She tried to convince us to stay. Considering how much better we felt to
be off the stupid treadmill of broken promises, we refused. She asked us
to write down exactly what we wanted in terms of compensation, ASAP
because they were meeting about it tomorrow.
We went to the library and booked internet time, then spent an hour
going over everything trying to work out how it would change our plans.
In that hour we came up with 443 pounds of expenses all up - but we
forgot to include the rail passes (we didn't realise how much we hadn't
used, and how little time we'd have in the UK after cutting the
remaining weeks of work-time). We also hadn't booked the new Ryanair
flight, so we didn't realise just how much tax and airport fees would be
involved. The actual figure is more like 650 pounds.
We were up late to call Australia (especially me - Kate went to bed
before the second call I had to make after the travel agent found our
details and checked which flights still had space)
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