Thread: Martynh99 v First Choice

We were due to fly with First Choice on 21/12/06 at 8:25am. We got on the plane at 8:15 and were told of a 25 minute delay to the slot.
at 8:40 we pulled away from terminal, got 50 yards and were told there were techinical probs on place.
Engineers arrived and said 15-30 minutes to fix and we'd be on the way.

By 11:45am, they still hadn't fixed it and FC pilot announce they were getting a bus to take us back to the airport and it would take 1 hour to do this.

At 12:00 they announced they had a 'spare' plane and that would take us, we had to walk to the plane.

In the ~4 hours we sat on the plane, the aircon was off and my wife became ill, feeling sick and faint so we had to get off the plane. We were told that a FC supervisor would be in terminal to meet us and sort out arrangements.

When we got to the termimal, there was no FC supervisor and we were just fasttracked through customs and dumped in arrivals area after being told there were no more FC flights that day. We rang cust servs and got passed around between 6 depts before finally being told that a FC supervisor would be on departures desk.
We went to this desk and it was servisair again but in fairness, they sorted us out flights - the 11:55 flight was also delayed and we could get seats on there, at a cost of £260 for the 4 of us. We paid got the tickets and waited.

At 4:26, we boarded the plane - it was the same plane that we had got off in the morning.

It looks very much to us like FC 'acquired' the 11:55 plane to transfer the 8:25 flight onto to avoid the 5 hour EC Directive that allows passengers to claim a refund and compensation. This then delayed another 300 or so passengers by 4 hours.

On the first 4 hour wait, we were only offered water, nothing else. When we were offloaded from the place, we were offered no medical attention.

In my opinion we have a claim in that FC did not fulfil their duty of care(medical to my wife) under EC law, a refund of the £260 flight out that we have since noticed was a return ticket for return to Man the next day.

Also I am appealing for anyone on these 2 flights to get in touch (fca2452, fca2406).

In addition, the hotel is not upto standard either so that's another claim but i've got that one covered off already and have already had a refund of just over 1000 euros already in resort (taken as a part refund and put in writing signed by a rep)

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Our original flight 'acquired' the 11:55 scheduled flight's aircraft. My wife was too ill to depart on the original flight so we had to purchase tickets for the original 11:55 that was subsequently delayed whilst the original aircraft for the 8:25 flight was repaired.


Update: FC have agreed to pay us another £205 in respect of the All Inclusive part of the holiday but that is just the other 3 days at the hotel contract rate - they're still trying to do us out of the £680 they make as profit on the AI uplift over self catering.

There is another issue that I didn't mention in my original post and that relates to FC mis-selling the accomodation as suitable for 4 adults. With the evidence I have - this has now been passed to Trading Standards and ABTA to pursue.

Abta just offered arbitration service which I declined and have now passed this onto a specialist solicitor to handle.

subscribing

Just to update on this post, we handed this over to the solicitor at the end of September who have written to First Choice on 3 occasions and First Choice haven't even bothered to acknowledge the solicitors letters never mind reply to them. :o

So it looks like were off to court now - just got to fill out the witness statements and court forms and wait for a date.