Good morning, how can I ruin your holiday?
As a student, I worked in the call centre for a large cross-channel ferry company, back in the day when people believed that booking something on the internet was the same as handing your credit card over to a friendly Nigerian businessman. Most people still called up to make bookings or enquiries.

The work was tedious and the days were long – with every minute of your activity, including loo breaks, being timed - but it was doable, the money was good, and the customers were mostly fine. Every now and then there was even some entertainment, such as the customer who couldn’t understand why we didn’t sail to Switzerland.

In short, it beat working retail. But for me, that changed when the company carried out one of the pettiest acts of corporate larceny I can imagine.

As well as Dover-Calais, the company ran another service from Newhaven (further down the coast, in Sussex) to Dieppe. There was a special offer on both routes; if you booked and paid your holiday for next year by Dec 31st, you got the trip for £100 – about half of what you’d normally pay.

All summer we took bookings for people’s holidays next year. But while we could input the Dover-Calais ones into the system, the ferry times for any crossing from Newhaven after February weren’t set up. Us call centre monkeys were told not to worry as the schedule wasn’t finalised yet; we should just take the punters’ money and book them in for the days they wanted, and the details would be sorted out later.

I went away to Uni and came back to work in December. The times for Newhaven still weren’t set.

Then, one week into January, the company cancelled the Newhaven-Dieppe route. Customers were given a choice of a cancellation and refund, or rebooking on Dover-Calais. Cue travel chaos, unhappy punters, and a lot of ruined holidays.

But what tips this story from unfortunate business decision into full-blown deceit is this: the company knew it was cancelling the route all along. That’s why the ferries weren’t in the systems – it never had any intent of running them in the first place. It only pretended they were to get people to sign up for the special offer.

By doing so, it not only had the customers’ money for at least a couple of months, but it also ensured that most of them would now travel with the company, albeit on a route (Dover-Calais) that they didn’t want to use.

Apologies for the lack of funny, but it’s been ten years and I’m still pretty Pissed (&) Off about this. To screw over so many of your customers, solely for getting hold of their cash for a little bit longer, just seemed so short-sighted and evil to me. I left and never went back.
(silencer, Fri 4 Sep 2009, 13:06, 2 replies)

I
just read that with my jaw on the floor.

Good for you that you left, I think I would have left and gone to the papers as well.

Scumbags.

I don't suppose you want to gaz me the name of the company so that I can avoid using them for this alone!?

I promise the name will go no further, I just simply will never use them.
(dchurch bah, Fri 4 Sep 2009, 15:24, closed)

There is a clue in the story.
Try to Pick Out a company at random.
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Fri 4 Sep 2009, 16:41, closed)