I’m not one for a load of nostalgic yearning for the good old days. That sounds ironic for someone who for the last good few decades has almost exclusively spent their holidays in a place where the main currency is memories, but I am almost allergic to the boomer porn “things were better in my day” guff prevalent in most Facebook communities.
However, this week I have been looking back all bleary eyed at that time not so long ago that you could book a holiday and know, almost with certainty that it would happen as planned. Sure, the odd volcano eruption or hurricane could scupper your plans, but at least they were natural.
Since those heady days of Covid, it seems that nothing is certain until you are sat on the plane hurtling down the runway. I look back in horror at the endless uncertainty of those early post Covid months and years when trips were endlessly booked, rescheduled and in some cases cancelled.
Ever since, it seems the world has got itself into a downward spiral of uncertainty and simple things like a trip to WDW can no longer be taken for granted. Our upcoming September trip is still in pencil rather than ink, waiting to see if the US descends into civil war or indeed if World War 3 happens before we can get there.
In the last couple of weeks Mexico entered the game, with a “hold my cerveza” with cartel violence ripping through the country. As soon as Louise saw that our trip was in deep jeopardy. I did not appreciate one bit that the cartels waited until we had paid in full before subjecting their country to these horrors.
I was pretty certain it would all calm down by late April, but it didn’t stop Louise from going on a one woman mission to find us an alternative destination, less likely to see us held at gun point in my speedos. So for the last week we have been spending our evenings watching videos on You Tube of lovely looking places all around the globe.
With Mexico discounted, and the US already in our definite maybe pile, pickings were slim. I may be a working class lad from Bolton, but we soon also discounted closer countries such as Greece, Turkey and Spain as, at least with TUI who we would have to stick with to avoid huge cancellation fees, that meant flying with Easyjet or Ryanair and well, no thank you.
Having virtually visited Thailand, Bali, Tanzania and other far flung locations, we had almost settled on a resort in one of those. The search is now such a blur I cannot remember which to be honest. This search was not helped by my current working situation meaning I could devote little to no time aiding the hunt.
On Friday however, I managed to eek out half an hour over what in a normal job would be my lunch and I did one last search on the TUI site before attempting to swap us over. There it was, about half way down the first set of results.
To be honest, I had been reluctant to change our holiday at all, as I loved Secrets Akumal so much and I was very much looking forward to going back. I almost felt like I was betraying them by looking elsewhere. Having spent so long finding somewhere to compete for our US WDW holiday money, we had finally found somewhere that perfectly ticked all our boxes.
So when I saw another Secrets resort, seemingly in the ball park of our budget/spend on the Mexico trip I quickly clicked to find out more. It did seem to tick all those same boxes, and unlike the Thailand, Bali options it meant a direct flight in Premium with TUI rather than indirect flights of over 18 hours in economy with another airline.
Louise reviewed and accepted my choice and it was then down to me to do the business. Now, it starts to get interesting (I make no promises you will find this interesting, but that is sort of baked into all my posts).
Earlier in the week I have chatted with TUI to establish that we could change our trip for £50 each and whatever the difference in price was, so I expected this to be painless. Having priced up the new holiday on their site, I found the “Amend my holiday” option and off I went. At the final stage where the money became involved I thought it odd that the price I was now looking at was 20% higher than the price I had seen on their site.
I opened up another chat and to say the contents of this chat was confusing is like saying I have a restricted fringe. I explained my dilemma and shared the price differences. After a good twenty minutes I was more confused than ever, as I was told that it was both an extra £1700, or maybe £1200 to change my holiday, despite their site pricing it just a couple of hundred more than my original booking or I could just cancel my first booking for £570 and book the new one as a new trip. I declined all options as that just sounded dodgy and not right at all. Apparently it was something to do with brand new bookings getting some automatic discount but amendments did not. The insistence on companies to reward new customers over loyal returning ones baffles me.
I had another go on their site and tried to cancel my existing trip for that £570 so I could book afresh and their site then told me I’d lose £2500 if I cancelled. What the……??
At this point I resorted to the nuclear option and I phoned them. I was raging at this point. Disinformation, uncertainty, lies and an unreliable website were all in play and I just wanted to change my trip for the £100 I’d been told and move on with my life.
The lady I spoke to was awesome. She listened to me moan at length, agreed that was a shit show and vowed to help me. She also immediately spotted that my original booking had the TUI Flex option on it (I had forgotten) which meant I didn’t even need to pay the £100 admin fee.
She patiently worked through a whole range of options of dates and length of stays. We had always regretted only booking for 8 nights originally, and as this was part of our 30th anniversary tour, we figured we should go bigger as we may well kill each other before our next significant milestone. I had also had to cancel a few days off I had planned around Easter due to work being crazy so as punishment to them I figured I would tack on a few days at the start of this trip to make up for it.
So after literally hours of faff (most of which I have spared you) extending late into Friday evening, thanks to that lovely lady on the phone, all those ridiculous and confusing sums of money quoted online went away and we managed to change our booking, extend from 8 to 14 nights all for an extra £460. I was very happy.
If you feel like it was hard work reading that, imagine what it was like trying to navigate it.
Anyway, so what have we changed to?
We have secured another Secrets resort, Secrets Playa Esmeralda, in the Dominican Republic. It’ll be our first time going there, assuming we aren’t all dead as a result of a world wide nuclear escalation.
It is a direct flight, retaining our Premium cabin from the Mexico booking and all in all, if we had to change (and Louise said we did) I don’t think we could have done much better.
We will definitely return to Secrets Akumal, unless of course we like this place so much better, but even so I do feel we’d like to return as we loved it so much.
I don’t think I have it in me to rearrange another holiday so unless the US is literally on fire and/or travel is banned due to world wide conflict, I think we’ll be going. Won’t you all be relieved being spared another of these posts.
Till the next time……
Mkingdon's Blog 