Booking through online travel agents can have pitfalls – such as arriving for a luxury holiday only to find it doesn’t exist
The five-star Retallack Resort near Newquay is one of Cornwall’s top watersports centres, where guests are housed in self-catering lodges with glazed frontages overlooking a lake, and Ian Tomlinson and his family were looking forward to spending their summer holiday there.
However, when they arrived after a four-hour drive they were told there was no record of the reservation he had made via the online travel agent Booking.com six months previously. Nor was there any possibility of fitting them in. Booking.com, alerted to their plight, fired off an email reassuring the family that it had found them a similar alternative – in Uxbridge, a London suburb close to Slough. The email said it hoped they were having a great day.