The worrying trend distancing travel companies from their customers
“Government launches proposals to better protect holidaymakers,” was the headline of a press release sent out by the Consumer Minister, Margot James last week. Glaring split infinitive aside, the release was mostly good news. It represents the second stage in implementing an EU initiative which aims to improve the financial protection for consumers who book their travel arrangements online.
The first part - extending the ATOL protection scheme which covers most flight-based holidays - was announced by Theresa May last month. The second stage is a consultation on how best to offer further financial protections for holidaymakers buying travel arrangements online and give them better information about that protection and other legal rights when they book. So, for example, in many cases consumers will be protected against insolvency even where they have bought a flight from an airline website and at the end of the booking process have clicked through to another provider which offers car hire or accommodation for the same trip.
It will also ensure that the website or company that puts such a package together is legally responsible for all the elements it books, even where they are fulfilled by third party suppliers in a foreign country. That is very important, because one major obstacle which effectively guarantees that a consumer won’t get proper redress is when they have to try to claim compensation, or recover lost money from a company overseas.
These proposals are, broadly, to be welcomed. But there is another more insidious problem for travellers and holidaymakers I think is developing out of our digital culture which these measures don’t address. I see it every week on our Ask the Experts email (asktheexperts@telegraph.co.uk) which tries to help readers with questions or complaints and where a handful of themes crop up persistently. There are the perennial complaints about car hire, which we regularly highlight on these pages. But the other issue which constantly crops up is the huge frustration experienced by readers when trying to communicate with companies - especially when they have queries or complaints about their holidays. They get no reply to their emails, they can’t get through on the phone and when they do, no-one calls back. In short they get passed from one operator to the next, one bounce-back to another, in a Kafka-esque world of failed communication.
It is not just rogue online agents failing their customers here: many of the complaints are about well-known mainstream travel companies clearly under-investing in this side of their customer service. Indeed a cynic might say that they are deliberately making it harder to make and follow through with complaints - hoping no doubt that if they make it frustrating enough, the customer will simply give up and go away.
Whether deliberate or not, I think the consequences of this approach are that many travel companies - and indeed companies in other service industries - are fast losing the sense of their customers as individuals. Heady with the savings to be made from taking bookings online, without the costs and trouble of paying a real person to answer the telephone or reply to emails individually, they are depersonalising their entire business models.
When automation works, it can be wonderfully efficient. But, as we all know, when it goes wrong it is frustrating and alienating in the extreme. I don’t think this is something which easily be solved by EU directives or government legislation. They can protect us from financial failures, not cynicism and indifference. But, in future, how many of those failures happen among companies who have forgotten to treat their customers as individuals? More and more, I would say.
