Help, Stuck in a foreign country!

[ILoveMondeo]

johnwilliams77 said:

To be fair, you did give a bit back with you debating the speed limitations of a mini bus, so don't say you didn't enjoy it.

Don't you have a phone data connection where you were? That would have been good enough for re-booking flights. No 24hr emergency number with your travel agent? Big companies agents do have.

Fair enough. I didnt intend to sound short or sharp about that, I felt it was a pretty impractical choice (but a valid route home though), being tired and irritable the prospect of a 20hr drive didnt seem nice.

Another thing I learned this trip... since my last time on the continent, data used to be very expensive and you'd have to keep sending text messages to get topped up. Which was fine.

These days they've done some mega EU deal where you can only be charged a couple of quid a day, also fine!

however... they've also introduced some pretty stingy "fair use" clauses and bandwidth throttling, use over 50-100MB in a day (which if fk all for web browsing, email and all the rest, I sync my email and it can be a good chunk of that for a few hours) and they throttle your bandwidth to a complete snails pace. Plenty of talk about it on the O2 forums about the same as I discovered. Very frustrating.

[ILoveMondeo]

The Mad Monk said:

Glad you are back safely.

Thanks!

[ILoveMondeo]

HotJambalaya said:

Im curious which airline this is? I always thought that at T-24 hours the ticket is now under airline control, and is fully their responsibility so for them to be claiming they can't do anything because its an agency ticket is a bit odd. However I'm not particularly familiar with corporate travel, so not sue if it applies here, though I've never heard of it not applying.

My first step would be to find a new travel agency though, one that offers 24/7. The best ones will be calling you up the second the cancellation has happened and be telling you which flights they've pro-actively re-booked you on.

Secondly whats your travel insurance like? Something like delays and cancellations can be pretty easily covered, you would be temporarily out of pocket, but then at least the insurance co would be chasing up who's responsible and be re-imbursing you

Not sure if naming and shaming rules allow it? National(I think) airline of a country famous for vikings and lots of oil.

It's a low cost operator but the plane was great with tonnes of legroom. Spanky new 737-800 I think?? May be wrong, no expert.

They aren't in the EU but are subject to the same rules when flying inside as far as I can tell.

Good advice about the agency. Duely noted. May be I just didn't have the out of hours number.

My insurance and a couple of the other have already said they would cover it all and if they felt the need reclaim direct from the airline. Another guy had such st cover his excess was enormous so no worth the effort making a claim. We require everyone get their own travel cover as it's essentially a jolly and not a business trip.

The agency have just said "send us all the receipts , we'll get it back and your compensation money" which will be handy if it works, lots of paperwork saved.