NOT TAHITI BUT BREAK OUT THE SNORKELS ANYWAY!
Picture the scene: we’ve been in Australia for two weeks, having spent time with my family paying final respects to the memory of my younger brother who passed away a year ago, and now we are finally at Sydney Airport to catch our flight to Tahiti for our dream honeymoon. The emotion of the compassionate part of the trip is over – we are finally heading toward paradise.
It gets a little tense as the check-in clerk points out that our combined luggage weight is around 55kg. We patiently explain that we have already made an arrangement through their offices to have the limit upped to 60kg. She checks the computer screen and acknowledges that this is the case. We relax.
“But,” she continues, “you will have to pay excess for this bag anyway…” (she points to the moulded blue plastic case)
I tense up. I am confused.
“Why?” I ask plaintively. “The total weight of our bags is fifty five kilos. It’s less than the allowable maximum.”
“Yes,” she says, “but the maximum permissible weight per item is twenty five kilograms! This bag is thirty kilograms.”
I look at her incredulously then at my new wife with an expression that says: is this woman kidding or what? The blue case reposes defiantly on the scale in silence refusing to budge.
“Baggage over twenty five kilos,” she says patiently, “is considered too heavy and potentially dangerous to handle.”
“Well how much is the excess cost?” I ask with barely concealed frustration, imagining the wimpy Aussie baggage handlers who can’t manage a measly 30kg suitcase.
“It will be around twenty dollars a kilo,” she says. The mental calculation is instantaneous - $100 at the (then) exchange rate of R6.50 to the Aussie dollar is R650! That’s ridiculous, (especially as I know the case isn’t likely to get any lighter on our travels and the Rand is hardly poised to strengthen).
“What’s the answer?” I ask.
The check-in clerk looks at me with a practised professional smile and suggests we buy another bag and distribute the load between three bags to avoid the excess costs. I check my watch. We have enough time. Exhaling like a Pamplona bull after a heavy day at the charge, I heft the offending blue case off the scale and reload the baggage trolley, smiling comfortingly at Karen.
“Let’s do it,” I hiss and stride purposefully toward the luggage shop half a kilometre down the departures concourse.
The purchase is swift and it’s only $35 (R230). We then sit on a bench and redistribute the load across the three bags and head back confidently to the check-in counter. The clerk had had the decency to concede that we needn’t queue again – just come back and recheck the bags.
The bags are loaded – all legitimately under the magical back-breaking borderline of 25kg each – beautiful!
I am now grinning at Karen as the excitement of the island trip hits me again. Then within the space of just one sentence (it could have been construed as a prison sentence), our dreams and hopes are smashed into a million pieces.
“Where are your visas?” the check-in clerk asks.
I dig deep within myself looking to find some sign that this woman is kidding after the luggage saga.
“We haven’t got visas,” I respond, “We were told we didn’t need them for Tahiti on a South African passport. It’s part of France…”
The check-in clerk’s face folds into a frown. “I’m sorry – that’s not the case…” she gestures to a senior staff member who bustles officiously over to where we are standing. The situation is swiftly explained. The supervisor is scrutinising our passports as if the visas will miraculously appear from the ether with the correct degree of encouragement like an enchantment from a Harry Potter spell book.
Karen’s body language has diminished her diminutive stature even further; she is shrinking into herself as I see the dismay descending over her. Her eyes are brimming with tears.
“We were told by our travel agent we didn’t need visas,” I repeat. Karen says the same thing. “We asked them three times,” she says as if that will convince the woman that they must somehow be mistaken.
The supervisor is curt and sharp with her response: “All South African travel agents know a visa is required for your passports to French Polynesia.” She takes in our glazed expressions.
“It’s part of the Schengen agreement,” she adds as if that clarifies everything. I am standing there feeling like I am being lectured by an old-school headmistress. My wife is shrinking before my eyes. I can feel a mixture of disappointment, anger and frustration welling up in me as my project-manager mind goes into top gear. It’s Saturday; it’s also Australia Day – 26th January so that means anything that is usually open today won’t be. South Africa is nine hours behind us and I don’t think I have the travel agents’ emergency numbers. We’re screwed.
And as that thought crystallises in my mind, Karen erupts. She begins to sob over her hand luggage as if her dearest friend had just died. I move to her side and extend a hand.
The school mistress suddenly warms. She can feel our desperation. The tears have flicked a switch.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I ask. “Can’t we get hold of passport control in Tahiti and arrange emergency visas or something?” I am reaching. I don’t know what else to do. I hug my wife and hold her against me, the sobs thudding thick and hot into my chest.
Schoolmarm smiles and nods then spins toward another staff member holding a phone. A call is made and we can almost discern a muted one-sided conversation across the distance between us. She returns but she isn’t smiling.
“I’m sorry,” she begins. “There’s nothing they can do… I’m sorry…”
Karen’s body racks with more intensity as the inevitability of our predicament hits us both. We’re not going to Tahiti. Certainly not today in any event.
The sympathy from the Tahiti-Nui airline staff is palpable as we make our despondent way toward the ground floor and the hotel-reservation and car-hire kiosks. Their sympathy is appreciated but it changes nothing.
After rehiring a car and arranging accommodation through Sydney Visitor Centre, we drive back to Sydney city and book into the hotel; Potts Point Holiday Inn. I check my laptop for emergency numbers for Seekers Travel in Fourways but find nothing and have to revert to sending an email to Robyn Barrett, the multiple-award winning travel consultant who has yet to show her true colours in this saga. It is, after all, Saturday and they will be working in South African later on. I mentally commit to phoning there later at the appropriate time.
In the meantime, we try to piece together our shattered day, and as it is a festive time in Australia, we decide to watch the fireworks display down at Darling Harbour with the hundreds of thousands of Aussies who have swarmed to the city for the occasion. The loss of my wallet after the fireworks results in even more sobbing and despair but miraculously it’s found and returned to me after a late-night search on the roof of a multi-storey car park. It is all too much.
When we get back to the hotel, exhausted and emotionally drained from the day and after I have spoken to Robyn, who is clearly not good under pressure as she has referred me to her senior, Mary-Ann Goddard; I see there is a response from Mary-Ann. She is suggesting an alternative to our predicament which takes us to Easter Island via Santiago (Chile) and not via Tahiti as was originally planned. While we are in Easter Island, she commits to assisting us with obtaining the necessary visas for Tahiti “if you (we) are spending time in Tahiti” which we clearly are. The one-night stopover in Tahiti en-route to Easter Island was merely a convenience booking in order to coordinate a connection with a group of people with whom we were rendezvousing for a workshop. After the Easter Island leg we were scheduled to return to Tahiti for the remainder of the workshop and an island wedding ceremony as well as a week’s honeymoon surrounded by coral lagoons on this volcanic atoll in the Pacific.
None of it happens though. The following day, Sunday 27th, we return to Sydney Airport, return the hire car and confirm the booking with Qantas who run Lan Airlines (the principle Chilean airline) operation there. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately in the scheme of things), Seekers hasn’t been able to make the payment for this trip - only to book it. This strikes me as odd but when I see the price I begin to realise that Seekers seems to be ducking any form of financial commitment whatsoever. As yet we have received no recompense and I am now being asked to fork out AU$9,300 for these tickets, some R60, 000! This is for one-way tickets only between Sydney-Santiago-Easter Island! Unbelievable!
Karen looks desperate again. “What shall we do?” she asks.
“I tell you what,” I say. “I’ll let the gods decide. I’ll try and pay for this on both my credit cards and if it goes through then we’re meant to go. If it doesn’t, we’re not and …um…well…we’ll have to book back into a hotel…”
She looks at me and nods. “Ok,” she says, “fair enough.”
We try. No luck. It isn’t happening.
By now Europcar and the staff at the Sydney Visitors’ Centre are getting to know us quite well and I’m sure I could conduct guided tours of Sydney Airport. We rehire a car yet again and explain our sorry predicament to Jenny at SVC and she books us in at the Old Sydney Holiday Inn at The Rocks.
There is nothing left to do but wait until Tuesday (Monday is a public holiday due to the Australia Day event) and try our luck at the French Consulate General in downtown Sydney. In the meantime, we kick back and take turns at breaking down over this debacle. With the previous scenario (flying via Santiago to Easter Island) we would have crossed the date line and would have ironically ended up on the same flight with the tour group that were travelling from Chile, and missed nothing of the workshop. What wasn’t guaranteed, of course, was the Tahiti leg as this relied on obtaining visas, while we were in Easter Island, to allow us entry to complete our workshop and honeymoon. Given the debacle through Seekers thus far, we weren’t absolutely convinced this would happen.
Tuesday arrives and the visit to the French CG yields nothing, they aren’t interested in our case, our pleading, the fact that we are on honeymoon – nothing! There is no such thing as an emergency visa and the standard visa will take 2 weeks to issue (potentially longer) in which case our honeymoon is over. We are simply devastated and Karen remains heart-brokenly numb for a few days.
I have made no mention of the other factors that Seekers failed to deliver during this “dream” excursion of ours which are namely:
Robyn discovered that the flights she had booked from Sydney to Tahiti were actually on the wrong dates. There were no flights on the dates appearing on the tickets. Therefore she simply adjusted our itinerary to reflect the correct dates and left the tickets as they were. We had to visit Qantas offices in Australia to have them changed and endorsed for travel under the advice of a friend in Australia who happened to be in the travel industry.
While on the subject of the itinerary: had we stuck to these guidelines, we would have missed our return flight to South Africa via Kuala Lumpur as the Seekers itinerary stated that we had to leave the hotel at the time the flight was actually taking off! If we hadn’t checked this against the actual tickets, we would have missed the flight.
Robyn then failed to pre-book the correct food option for us on Malaysia Airlines and we received vegan options rather than the lacto-vegetarian options we had requested from her.
She also failed to pre-book the seats we asked for on the first leg of the trip and we ended up enduring an extremely uncomfortable 10 hours to Kuala Lumpur from Johannesburg
She also asked us to pay for our Sydney hotel in advance (we arrived there for a stopover while my sister, also flying from SA arrived the day after us) which we duly did. However, when we arrived at the hotel, they had received the booking confirmation only – not the money thus I had to pay for it again. I am still awaiting recompense for this double payment.
All these service offerings from the award winning travel consultant of the year – multiple years in a row, I must add. She must have been having an off-year!
One of the main reasons we had been sold on the Seekers one-stop travel service offering was they had their own internal visa department. That is certainly the way it was portrayed to us by Robyn who even went as far as to refer to Visas International as “our visa company” in an email to us during the copious correspondence between us. And for the record, Seekers’ own terms and conditions make the same claim: “PASSPORTS Please note that it is the clients (sic) responsibility to check that you are holding a valid passport for your journey. Should you be travelling on a temporary passport you need to check that the country you are travelling to will accept a temporary passport. You are welcome to contact our In-House Visa Company should you require any assistance.” (My bold italics)
At no point did Robyn point out to us that VI was a separate entity or that we were responsible for finding out about our own visas, on the contrary, she touted them as a Seekers’ value-add. We asked her more than once about visas for Tahiti and were told by her more than once that they weren’t necessary as Tahiti was part of France and South Africans didn’t need visas for France; something which she now flatly denies. After all, given this debacle – there is little chance she’ll make the cut for Consultant of the Year 2008 if she admits to any ineptitude. (Have a look at the bullet point list above – too late for that). Seekers and “their In-House visa company” clearly didn’t seem to be aware of the Schengen agreement which I Googled while I was waiting in the hotel for Tuesday to arrive, as well as “French Polynesia visa requirements” to find out in single search the following information:
http://www.wordtravels.com/Travelguide/Countries/Tahiti+and+French+Polynesia/Visa
which revealed:
Which anyone will admit, is self-explanatory and not very hard for a layperson to discover. So the question remains – why didn’t Seekers and “their In-House visa company” know this? After all, they had booked us all the way through to French Polynesia and had taken my money for this service. And they had been quick to point out our visa requirements for Australia. We assumed they knew what they were doing and foolishly took the word of the travel agent of the year four years running when she told us we didn’t need visas for Tahiti. Silly of us to believe her.
We then spend the next week at our hotel as admin executives, phoning & emailing South Africa, trying to rebuild the shambles of our honeymoon and contacting our agent in Tahiti, who’d organised the internal aspects of the trip over there, to tell her that we wouldn’t be making it after all despite our best efforts.
We received a full refund from her almost immediately and this was transferred into my American Express card within a day.
No such luck with Seekers Travel, however. They merely offered alternative trips and I noticed that they were careful not to say “compensatory” anywhere in their correspondence and the alternatives arrived in the form of “quotations”. But going to Phuket (as nice as it may be) was not what we had dreamed and wasn’t what we wanted, thus we rejected their suggestions and told them we’d resolve the matter on our return to South Africa and would advise them of our new travel arrangements as we’d decided to book an internal Australian excursion to the outback.
And as promised, on our return, I compiled a dossier of the correspondence, the consequential costs including the non-refundable workshop costs that we’d forfeited, the fares to Tahiti and back from Sydney, car-hire, loss on foreign currency rates that we’d exchanged in anticipation of the Tahiti/Easter island leg then re-exchanged at a loss when it all fell apart, hotel costs while we’d been stuck in Sydney etc.
We asked for no more than we’d spent – in fact we asked for less than we’d spent; we excluded cellphone, internet costs etc. as a result of this debacle which, we do not believe was any fault of ours. The total (without trauma & stress factored in) came to around R104,000.00 and Seekers has had the opportunity to do the right thing and reimburse us for this dream turned nightmare.
But Seekers sought rather to play a waiting game and I was shunted from Mary-Ann to a William Fourie who didn’t bother to read the correspondence properly as he didn’t grasp that we weren’t claiming for our internal Tahiti excursion as part of the overall claim, merely the cancellation costs which were a paltry €70 (R700 at that time). He somehow thought I was trying to claim recompense from Seekers that had nothing to do with them. I wasn’t. I’m still not.
I consolidated our claim on 20th February when we returned only to have Seekers thank me for this a day later then request, on 28th February (after several follow up phone calls to them), that I collate this into a letter to them which I duly did on 3rd March.
They then informed me they would meet (twice for some reason – internal conflict perhaps?) over the matter and come back to me with a formal response by Friday 14th March which they did.
Not only is there not one single acknowledgement of responsibility by Seekers/Tourvest/Thomsons Tours for this comedy of errors, not even where I have had to pay for things twice, they politely told me to go and screw myself in the most eloquent of legalese they could muster by disingenuously claiming “their In-House visa company” actually isn’t In-House after all, in fact it has nothing to do with them.
But I beg to differ and it can be clearly shown in the correspondence that they maintained their ownership role of handling the visas until they realised they had botched it whereupon they adopted a 360 degree shift in attitude and ran for the hills.
I also beg to differ that Visas International was at any time portrayed as being anything other than their, Seekers’, “In-House visa company” affirming an overall ownership to the customer of this perception – they even go as far as to claim this fact. But elsewhere in the fine print lurks little escape clauses and presumably within their company hierarchal documentation they can prove that Visas International is actually not IN but Out-House.
In my world an Outhouse is a place where people go to dump crap and this is certainly the attitude adopted by this unprofessional company of people, the crap in question being unceremoniously but unequivocally dumped on their unhappy client. Rather than admit to a horrible mistake that caused a couple to be denied their dream honeymoon, they now definitely Seek to hide behind a single clause in their terms and conditions that both contradicts another clause in the same conditions as well as their portrayal of Seekers as a one-stop, turnkey travel operator offering one butt to kick. Well, I choose now to kick that butt.
I thus must broadcast to the world the nature of this company and warn others against the same despicable treatment of customers while I pursue this matter through my attorneys.
Seekers sucks – big time!
PS: read this for a laugh from Seekers’ website http://www.seekers.co.za/ReadContent1.aspx
(Emphases courtesy of me)
About Seekers Travel
Seekers Travel has been in operation since 1989 and was acquired by the JSE-listed group, Tourism Investment Corporation (Tourvest) in 1999. The acquisition of Seekers consolidated Tourvest's position as South Africa's leading tourism group with top buying power, product and technology development and systems skills.
The Seekers expansion philosophy "growing big by staying small" sets the company apart from other operators in the travel industry. Growing big, as part of the Tourvest Group, enhances economies of scale. Staying small with decentralised accountability allows personalised customer service.
Seekers Travel has decentralised the organisation into specialised business units with independent decision-making power(1). The implications of this are that each unit within the company is empowered to take ownership of their service levels as well as resolution(2). Seekers believes that this adds great value to the relationship between Seekers and the client(3), using the standardised processes and procedures that have been implemented throughout the national network.
Seekers Travel is a radical leader in travel and is constantly striving to achieve customer satisfaction in all interactions with clients(4). Seekers has always been at the forefront of development in the travel industry and the expertise has been recognised by numerous industry awards.
Seekers is dedicated to growth without losing sight of service excellence(5). The company is committed to maintaining a professional approach(6) in an otherwise laissez-faire market. People are Seekers’ greatest resource and the company is pledged to the personal and professional development of their staff(7).
1. This doesn’t seem to be the case as the matter in point was referred up the line 4 times to attain any degree of “independent decision-making” i.e. Robyn Barrett to Mary-Ann Goddard to William Fourie to Gavin Stevens to Conrad G Mortimer
2. This is also laughable as no “ownership” has been taken for any of the ineptitude on their part thus far let alone resolution in any satisfactory manner other than to their own egos and arrogance
3. Sorry, can’t agree here either – they have added no value to their relationship with me, quite the reverse – they have undermined any value that may initially have been apparent. However, I ended up assuming an admin role on their behalf due to their inability to deliver as promised. I must thus conclude that I inadvertently added value to them…
4. Another hollow claim akin to the previous one. There has been no “striving” to satisfy this customer – only to polarise him as is evidenced by this sordid account of our honeymoon tour package.
5. Seekers hasn’t got a clue what “service excellence” is – certainly not in this case in any event
6. Their approach has been anything but professional and their follow-up dismally lacking until prompted by me
7. This is quite possible, however, the ethos instilled does not comply with this hype-laden “mission statement”
