France.com Tour company

[Katgoesonholiday]

On the 11th of June I made a booking through the France.com tour operator website for a dinner cruise on the Seine River, Paris on the 14th of July this year. On their website they stated that the price for this particular night may be higher than normal because of the special celebrations for the french National Day. So I wasn't too surprised when the ticket price for my husband and I was US$709.

 

I was given an order ID, the money was withdrawn from my account, and I was told that further information would be sent within 48 hours.

 

On the 16th I contacted France.com to say that I had not received confirmation and details for the evening. I received a very prompt and friendly email saying they would look into it.

 

On the 20th I emailed them again asking if they had an update on my booking. They responded on the 21st saying that in order to confirm my booking I would need to pay an additional US$257 (on top of the $709 already paid) for my husband and I.

 

I sent them the following email:

 

Dear ***,

 

I have to admit, I am very disappointed at the additional charge. I did see notification on the initial page for Yachts de Paris on your website that the dinner cruise may be more expensive on National Day but when I went through the booking process on your website I assumed that the pricing bought up when I put in that date was accurate. Accordingly I booked. I had no idea that after my reservation was accepted, and my money taken, that it would not be honored unless I paid more. It is actually illegal in New Zealand for a vendor to accept payment and then subsequently change the price and expect the purchaser to pay the difference. I would be surprised if the law is different in Florida or Paris.

 

I understand that France.com is an intermediary and as such has no control over the pricing, however I do feel that is poor practice to advertise one price on your website, accept bookings at the price, and not actually have accurate information. I am also disappointed at the delays in receiving any form of confirmation or correspondence with regards to my booking and the fact that I had to chase this up. I have made dozens of bookings for our European holiday and this is the only time I have encountered a third party website that has been unable to give me confirmation immediately. I do, however, appreciate your prompt and courteous assistance when I did email you.

 

I have spoken to my husband, who is currently in Europe on business, and we have decided that we are not willing to proceed with this booking. These kinds of shenanigans make us feel quite insecure about being able to trust that we can turn up to the pier and not have anything else go awry. And since we are traveling for almost two weeks before this, I am not going to have easy access to internet to monitor this booking and sort out any further problems that may crop up.

 

We would like you to refund the monies already paid immediately. Once that is done we will be leaving reviews about our experience on Tripadvisor and other relevant websites (CruiseCritic, Facebook etc), as is my practice, so it would be preferable if that review doesn't reflect any further delays.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Kat

 

They refunded the money almost immediately - I was actually very impressed with the speed. Paypal has confirmed the refund and I expect it to go into my bank account overnight tonight.

 

I have since found out through another tour company that the dinner cruise for that night has completely sold out (noted only hours after we told them we would not be paying additional and wanted a refund). I suspect that our booking was never fully processed and our reservation wasn't in place - so there is really nothing they could have done to get us on that particular dinner cruise anyway. Having said that, this boat company does run two dinner cruises and the other (cheaper) one still has places available.

 

Anyway, the reason I post this is that it is helpful for people contemplating using this agency to realise that the stated price may not be the actual price and they need to manage their booking very carefully and not just trust that everything has been sorted. If they don't get confirmation (i.e. a separate email, not just a booking order number - which we had) then they need to follow up as soon as possible. I have heard of other people using the agency with no problems, and I do have to confirm that the person I communicated with seemed lovely and very helpful. Its just a very unfortunate situation that their website was not up to date with prices and they were unable to honour our booking.

[Katgoesonholiday]

I have since found out through another tour company that the dinner cruise for that night has completely sold out (noted only hours after we told them we would not be paying additional and wanted a refund). I suspect that our booking was never fully processed and our reservation wasn't in place - so there is really nothing they could have done to get us on that particular dinner cruise anyway. Having said that, this boat company does run two dinner cruises and the other (cheaper) one still has places available.

 

 

The highlighted part is pure speculation on my part and may not actually be the case. I decided to remove this whole paragraph so as to stick purely to the facts but it was past the 20min cut off time for editing. So please ignore what I have written here. :)