Q. We booked a holiday in September last year through Expedia, flying EasyJet. The outward flight from Luton to Krakow with EasyJet was fine. We stayed in Krakow for five nights. We were worried that heavy snow might cause our return flight to be cancelled, so we checked the EasyJet website and found our flight was not listed. We checked our itinerary on the Expedia website and there were no changes. When we arrived at Krakow Airport we found that the flight had left two hours earlier: the flight time had been changed and we had not been told. We were unable to contact anyone from Expedia. We contacted EasyJet, which said the flight time had been changed three months earlier, in October and that Expedia should have informed us. We had to buy new flights at a cost of £471 and the total cost to us including accommodation was about £785. Neither EasyJet nor Expedia will cover the cost of this. As far as I am aware, Expedia did not inform us of any flight change. Expedia says it emailed us in November with the information, but it has yet to send me the promised copy of this email. It has sent me a copy of a Word document with the information that should have been sent to me, but this is not proof that it was emailed to us. LC, by email.
A. After we contacted Expedia, it contacted you agreeing ‘as a gesture of goodwill’ to repay £550 of your additional costs, while not accepting liability for the problem. Expedia says: “We are very sorry for the disruption that the rescheduling of [the reader’s] flight caused to her trip. We always email notification of flight schedule changes to our customers as soon as we receive the information from the airlines and we are in the process of ensuring that online itineraries are also updated.”
Q. I am having terrible problems with Dabs.com, an internet electricals retailer. On 2 November I bought an Acer Timeline 8471 notebook from them for £420.44. When I tried to set it up to use it I found the wireless networking to be intermittent and often non-functional. Frequently the machine fails to connect to networks that our other laptops connect to – even at close range to the access point. I have spent a lot of time seeking technical advice from Acer and my university’s IT department, unsuccessfully, but this was time consuming. I then contacted Dabs.com on 22 December to arrange a return. The item was returned back to me on 13 January with an engineer’s report stating there was “no fault found.” I am a medical student and need the laptop for my studies- it has already been away for 28 days on repair over the holidays leaving me computerless. Now I feel helpless and don’t know what to do. Dabs aren’t answering my emails and they don’t have phone support. What can I do? TB, Norwich.
A. Dabs.com is a subsidiary of BT, with whom we took up your complaint. BT says: “When the test engineers at Dabs examined the item they set it up to wireless, connecting without an issue. Over the course of four hours they restored software to eliminate software issues and could not find any hardware fault. The wireless connected and stayed connected for more than four hours and they at no time managed to replicate the customer’s fault. As such, the returns department were satisfied that the item was not faulty and that was why it was returned it to the customer. Nevertheless Dabs has refunded the customer in full.”