The Which? Awards – what do you think of our winners?

We (couple) have also used Trailfinders for many years, flying to the far east and Australia. Last October we asked at our local Birmingham branch about a holiday in Vancouver. I was interested to see the best travel company award posted in the front window, as I have been a Which? subscriber for many years as well. We told the rep we wanted to avoid Heathrow if possible. He investigated various options via mainland Europe but the cheapest was Air Transat from Manchester. We had never heard of them but he assured us they were fine. There was a quite a lot of pressure to book quickly (“these flights get booked up quickly etc.”). So we booked and paid, 8 months before travel, and thought no more about it until early March, when Trailfinders rang to say that our flight time had been changed from 13.30 to 10.00, which would mean being at Manchester airport at 7.00 a.m. So we booked a hotel near Manchester airport to be sure of being on time. In late April they rang again to say our flight was being changed to 12.00 noon. And two weeks ago they rang to say it was being changed for a third time, to 13.00, which is almost the time it was originally. All these changes made me worry about this airline, so I went online to find out more, and the reviews were very discouraging indeed regarding comfort and other aspects of service. We haven’t experienced it yet, so it remains to be seen whether it really is as bad as many say, but at no point did Trailfinders give any warning about them. Is it not part of the job of a travel agent to point out what you are getting for your money and what you are not getting? And in making my own further enquiries, I learnt that it is possible, in fact advisable, to reserve a seat on this flight (for an extra cost of course), whereas my Trailfinders receipt clearly states that seats will be allocated at check-in. When I tried to reserve, I found that all the better seats were already reserved, but I doubt they would have been last October. Moreover, I also now see that there is a flight with this same airline departing the next day which is £80 cheaper per passenger, which we could easily have taken had we been told about it last October. We asked Trailfinders if they would buy us a different ticket (e.g. from Birmingham with Air France via Amsterdam), which would cost us more, but they turned us down flat on the grounds that our Air Transat ticket is completely non-refundable. Doubtless they are right about this and as we cannot afford to forfeit our first tickets and buy completely new ones, we know we have no hope of redress and will accept our fate. Perhaps we will get to Vancouver and back in one piece – who knows? Will we use Trailfinders again? They have let us down badly in several ways, failing to tell us about a cheaper flight on a following day, failing to tell us about seat reservations and failing to point out the very mixed reputation of Air Transat. With short-haul travel I always make my own arrangements, and we only went to Trailfinders as we had had good service before and we assumed we would get the best advice. We made all these points to the rep, and we even told him we would be posting a report to Which?, but he had been trained to deal with people like us summarily, and that is precisely what he did. He was not only completely unmoved, but completely unapologetic. So no, we won’t use them again, and I would advise anyone to do a lot of homework first before using them, which will probably mean you don’t need to use them.