STA Travel CEO Complaint

Below is the letter that we sent to STA Travel's CEO. It was sent by recorded post on the 26th October 2011, and signed for on the 27th, but we have never had a reply. Surprisingly.

Peter Liney

STA Travel

Priory House

6 Wrights Lane

London

W8 6TA

Dear Mr Liney,

I am writing in reference to a problem our party recently had with an STA Travel round the world ticket, and our subsequent poor treatment by your customer relations department.

Our problem was with an incorrectly processed date change on one of our flights. We ended up stranded in Christchurch, New Zealand for a number of days whilst this was resolved. By resolved I mean that we were charged an additional £244 each to rebook the flights (and told that we would get this money back).

We were advised by our local STA rep to write a letter when we returned to the UK to claim back these expenses.

After a lengthy e-mail exchange we were eventually offered 50% of our receipted costs which worked out at £163 each. I believe this to be extremely unfair so wrote back to clarify some of the points made by the customer relations department. We got a standard reply and were given details of ABTA to make a further complaint.

After paying almost £2000 each for our initial ticket and then a further £35 each for the date change that never happened we felt extremely hard done by when we had to pay £244 to fix the ticketing mistake, and in the process totally miss out one of our scheduled stops.

I hope you can understand how upset we all are with this. We accept that mistakes can happen, but to then be forced to pay for them ourselves is really not on.

Our main issues are as follows:

1. We paid for a RTW ticket, but ended up missing one of the destinations due to this error.
2. We paid extra for a date change that didn't happen.
3. We then paid extra again to correct these mistakes and continue our trip
4. We spent wasted days in New Zealand in winter, after donating all of our warm clothing and food.

These were all caused by a “...breakdown in communication between [the] ticketing department and the respective branch...” as admitted by D Mozley (Customer Relations) on the 12/8/2011.

I know that you are not in the Customer Relations department, however on this occasion I feel they have failed to provide a reasonable level of service. Our treatment by STA Travel has been well below par, and I hope you can find some way to redeem your companies reputation in dealing with this matter.

We have collectively spent over £10,000 with STA Travel but have been left feeling totally cheated. There is no way I could ever recommend STA Travel to anyone and would be likely to suggest people avoid the company all together.

Yours Sincerely

Dan Bennett

Nicola Wilson

Peter Jones

Cheryl Whyte