Our Holiday from hell/ Don't fly with Thomas Cook!
Problems start before we even get on the plane, since it's an hour delayed despite everything being ready. But we just brush it off and get on board when we can. Second problem occurs before we take off: they've separated everyone! Like, there was a woman and her daughter behind us and the husband and another child was sat right at the front, and the child and father weren't sat next to each other, and the child was only 3. Thomas Cook had done this to make people pay more to be sat together.
Moving on to the experience at the hotel. First five days were of boring entertainment with staff that would ignore you until everyone who was speaking Spanish was served. This also applied to the children games, as we noticed that even though an english, American, French, or Canadian child had clearly won, they'd give the prize to a child who spoke Spanish.
Another major fault was the food. It was bad. Really bad. So bad it made all of us except one in our party ill, and it actually sent another to the hospital for four days. When telling the Rep who was supposed to look after us, he brushed us off, saying it was too much rum, though he'd barely touched any, and no one had even gotten tipsy. Turns out he was severely dehydrated and had gastroenteritis. At this point his wife, Michelle had told everyone who needed to know- Reception, the medical staff at the resort, the doctors, the hospital, the rep, and the people who monitor everything. But when she had to get some tablets to help their six year old with similar symptoms but not as bad, the monitors claimed to have no idea what was going on or that she didn't know Dan was in the hospital. When we updated the rep, he said that we should have told him, which led to Michelle arguing with him and calling him useless, which he was. He was eventually able to leave. The staff didn't care or come to check up on them.
Then there was Irma. Now I know that it isn't their fault that Irma happened, but Thomas cook could have done a hell of a lot more, as well as the staff.
Firstly, they cancelled our flight, for minimum 24 hours, while Canada sent 10 planes to pick up their citizens the day of the hit, and the same for Thompson, which is an English airline. They knew it was going to hit and instead of flying us out ten two days earlier than our scheduled leave, they left us there.
Remember how I said the staff only really cared when it Spanish speakers? This once again applied. They sent a message to tell them that the restaurant was going to close an hour early and we should be in our rooms by 7, and that they should go in, grab food and take it to their rooms. However, no one who spoke English or French got this message, and so a lot of us got nothing. Luckily the staff had prepared 2 days worth of food and water and delivered it to us. Also they left a canoe outside our door.
Luckily our rooms were designed to be shelters as well, but we were on the bottom floor and it was clear they expected flooding since we were close to the ocean. They'd moved people in the luxury hotels but not us. We had security outside our door the entire night who played around with a bike and scooter the entire night. Luckily, there was no flooding.
The storm passed and we're told that our flight has been CONFIRMED to fly Friday and land Saturday morning! So we're happy to hear that. We pay to keep on of our rooms till our check out at 6 that day, except, two hours before we check out, we're then told that our flight is in fact, not till the next day. We hadn't even found this out from Thomas Cook. Instead they were moving us to another hotel. Great.
So we're waiting and the coach arrives and we get on, and turns out there's people who didn't know about the change until we told them on the coach! Also by this point we still had NO IDEA to where they were taking us.
Luckily it was to a 5 star hotel, one up from our hotel. But immediately, there's flaws.
The family we went with consisted of two adults and two children, and the hotel gave them two single beds. Also our cieling and walls were dropping with water and wetting the bed. My mum complained about both and told us we needed to pay extra for another room even though it wasn't our choice to be there. My mum hung up and after another hour of wet bed and no bedding, we called again, this time talking to someone else. They luckily were nicer and moved only me and my mum to another room where we got two single beds and a pull out bed. Now it made sense they'd got confused, as the family we were with would have been better in there and us in their room. But by then it was 11pm, we were tired, fed up and just wanted to go home.
By this point, the stress had gotten to me and I'd bitten all
my nails off.
Next day comes, and we're dreading that they tell us that we aren't flying again. We check out, and talk to a guy from Thomas Cook, who was as annoyed as us at the situation. He'd not been told stuff either and there was times when the guests knew more than him. We can't fault him as he was trying his hardest. The bus comes and takes us to the airport and we're due to fly at 1.
People are waiting and then they tell us that the Airplane isn't on the tarmac even though we can see it. It's also at this point where we find out that another passenger's son has had a heart transplant and on the way, had a fit on the bus, and the rep had asked his parents to 'hurry him up' since he's 'holding up the rest of the passengers'.
We ended up stuck in the airport for another hour with no air conditioning.
In the end, as a group we're expecting a minimum of 10 grand back in compensation, and we're cancelled our flight to Cuba next year with Thomas Cook and rebooking it somewhere else with another company and expect our money back for both holidays as well as the medical bills and other things.
Thomas Cook can suck my non-existent dick.
