Our holiday was booked via Thomas Cook but included a flight back on Thomson Airways, leaving at 0050 and arriving at Bristol at 0330 or somesuch eeeeek.

So, we left the hotel at 2100 and arrived at the airport at around 2200. The check-in queue began.

It then became clear that something was wrong with the incoming aircraft – they hoped to send us on our way at 0500. Groans.

We all were checked in and went off to the departure lounge. At some point a couple of hours later we were told that the pilots’ flying hours regime would not permit them to arrive and then take us straight back, so we would have to go to a hotel and leave for home late afternoon.

We were taken to a collectivist-style resort hotel dominated by Russians (Note: not a bad effort to find a place able to take 200 or so people at such short middle-night notice and then muster the coaches to get us there.)

Everyone was told they could make one free two-minute telephone call home from their room to make quick new arrangements! Hurrah! This generous gesture was quickly foiled by the hotel who (suspecting that people would talk for more than two minutes and leave them with the bill?) removed the telephone cables leaving just a dead unattached hand-set(!). I made my weary way to reception to remonstrate about this. The front desk said that a technician would be sent asap to fix the problem. Of course no-one came.

I also suspect that some fast murky action had been done to evict some people from their holiday rooms to make way for us for those eight hours or so – the bathrooms had not been cleaned properly.

Anyway, we snoozed a bit, then fought our way through the Russian/Kazakh lunch buffet maelstrom to get something to eat. At 1500 the coaches arrived to return us to the airport. We arrived at 1600 and were checked in again – the display boards showed a departure at 1700, so we drifted to the named departure gate.

We waited until 1700. Nothing. No announcement.

Time dragged on until nearly 1900. No announcement of any description. By then British cheeriness was fast eroding. We could not get out of the departure gate area. The blank-faced Turk at the gate spoke no English and did not know how to contact the airport manager.

Partly to relieve the tedium and annoyance and partly to see what would happen, I dropped an email to the weekend FCO Response Centre team asking them to alert the in-country Embassy consular team to a possible riot.

I was pleased to get a sensible reply immediately, with follow-up contact as promised with the Embassy team who promptly got on to Thomsons to try to find out what was happening. Well done FCO.

Finally to sarcastic jeers the gates opened and we made it on to the aircraft. The captain offered some more or less heartfelt apologies, but could not persuade people that they had been properly treated by Thomsons.

We were then told that the in-flight meal had had to be cancelled as the food had gone off in the heat because the aircraft had been waiting for so long(!). But, of course, Thomsons did not offer the passengers complimentary snacks other than a piece of something alleged to be cake about one inch cubed. The cabin crew cheerily went about charging everyone for snacks.

The crew handed out the telephone numbers for seeking compensation – which of course require the caller to pay a fee, ie Thomsons make a bit more money from the victims of their own incompetence! They also handed out an email address for would-be complainants, which as I discovered on getting home does not work – you are steered to a complaints page on the Thomson website. 

*Sighs*

Part of the theory of free markets is the idea that competition improves service. Which it does – tens of thousands of Brits fly to Turkey and back on holiday, more or less as planned. Impossible to imagine not too long ago. 

What is hard to explain other than through total corporate cynicism is the way Thomson Airways handled this problem.

Their main failing was a complete lack of communication as to what was happening. If (as the pilot asserted to the passengers) they had done everything possible to leave at the earliest opportunity, they must have known well in advance when they were due to leave and that the in-flight food would not be available (so that eg people with young children could buy something to eat at the airport). But we heard literally not one word from anyone for the best part of 15 hours.  

Now the whole complaints procedure feels like a management consultancy scheme to erode the will of the complainants and so wriggle out by paying as little compensation as possible.

Risk management! They aren’t customers or even human beings any more. They’ve paid – now they’re a dead weight cost. And we have to minimise costs! So how best to do that ..? Ah, the imagery of the stiff obstacle course looms into view.

Many passengers won’t pick their way through the complaints procedure. Those who do will wait for 28 days to get a reply. Of those who get a reply, plenty will drift away or just forget about the whole business.

Of those who do make it through the procedures, some will be fobbed off with the minimum dribs and drabs of compensation.

Of those who aren’t, a computer algorithm and some data mining to show the middle-class or otherwise ‘tricky’ addresses will break down the remaining numbers to highlight which households know their stuff and really need to be paid off quickly. The rest can be left to twist slowly in the wind until it all just fades away.

Bizarre, and unpleasant.

Meanwhile my cruel accountant (aka Mrs Crawf) points out that Eurostar have not refunded me the train-fare promised after the blizzards fiasco back in December.

I sent them an email yesterday and have received a speedy and good if grammatically psychedelic email back:

Please accept my sincere apologies it does appear that the refund request issued to the relevant department did not get processed. This may of (sic) been that because the ticket was non refundable and we were not offering a refund or was due to an oversight in the 65,000+ refunds that were processed.

I have today refunded the Mastercard as you were promised by email and this will show by Friday on your account.

Now, armed with that triumph, I am pursuing a stray iTunes download – again getting a sensible and speedy reply from what appears to be a human being.

So, much of the time free enterprise does deliver something like good and intelligent service. Standards and efficiencies do edge up, all the time.

But within that great scheme and the wider human condition are pockets of severe incompetence, greed and spitefulness. It usually takes only a few minutes to find out whether the ‘culture’ of the organisation you’re dealing with (private or public sector) is working for you or somehow treating you as an annoying problem.

This time round, utterly ridiculous and insulting behaviour by Thomson Airways. Never again.