British tourists are “getting better” at complaining and standing up for their
rights, but some are taking their grievances a little too far, according to
the Association of British Travel Agents.
The Halkin Hotel in London received a written complaint that “the lavatory
paper was not folded and it was difficult to unravel”, while a customer at
the Malmaison hotel in Birmingham claimed that the night-lights in his room
left him confused: “I accidentally thought the walk-in wardrobe was the loo.”
Overseas, a holidaymaker in St Kitts demanded to move to another hotel after
saying that she “could hear the sea waves breaking on the shore”, while a
customer on the Pelion peninsula in Greece asked “why is there is no pizza
delivery service?” and a man on his honeymoon in Kenya was shocked when “a
passing (excited) elephant came to drink from the river and made me feel
very inadequate”.
An Abta spokesman agreed that many complaints received by travel companies
were “ridiculous”, but said that a culture of complaining was positive: “ We
should complain more. If you don't complain, the tour operator doesn't get
the chance to put things right.”
Perhaps the most bizarre complaint was at the Roxburghe Hotel in Edinburgh,
where a woman threatened to call police after claiming that she had been
locked in by staff.
In fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as
a warning to remain in the room. “We eventually calmed her down and she
enjoyed her stay,” the general manager, Chris Wayne-Wills, said.
A customer on a Marsdens Cottage Holiday was aggrieved that “the sea was a lot
farther away than the pictures in the brochure”.
It transpired that this was because the tide was out. A guest at Hell Bay
hotel on the Scilly Isles was upset when “a seagull tried to eat my
Pekinese”.
A traveller in the Dominican Republic told TripAdvisor.com that his resort
“had cockroaches the size of lions”. And a guest at the Park Plaza County
Hall in London moaned: “Surely if I'm English, I'm entitled to the English
breakfast.”
A survey conducted by the travel company Isango.com this summer found that 19
per cent of people “dislike going away because foreigners don't want to
speak English”.
However, when an angry British traveller told a waiter in Méribel in France
that he should treat his customers as kings - “le client est roi” - the
waiter replied calmly, in perfect English: “But don't you know what we did
to our kings?”
