Shocking service from Pentravel
I made use of Pentravel to book a holiday in Scandinavia, Europe and Dubai. Initially they were helpful, until our deposit was paid. It went on a steep downward slide from there. Emails were constantly unanswered. We had to send more than one email to get the attention of the consultant and even then not all the questions were answered. We had booked an unconfirmed Travel Tour, which we were advised about. The tour unfortunately did not go ahead, so we received a refund. The issue is that we were oversold additional insurance through Trafalgar, which in hind sight we felt was an oversell on their part. As the Trafalgar Tour did not materialize, our plan B was to do the "tour" on our own. We were charged additional booking fees, which is ridiculous, bearing in mind that we had spent close to R200 000 on tickets, etc. Train tickets were booked on our behalf, but we were not seated together. This was picked up when the tickets were issued. It was brought to their attention and they were not able to rectify their own error. On one of the other train tickets that we prebooked, there was no mention that we would be required to pay additional money when booking our seats. We were supposedly advised that we needed to reserve these seats ourselves. The cherry on the cake was arriving in Oslo at 18:00 on the 25th of December, we had an overnight stop in Oslo before flying to Prague at 06:00 the following morning. I had been struggling to check us in for the flight, so I decided to go to the airlines information desk and ask for assistance. We were then informed that Pentravel had not completed the booking. One positive was that we were able to get a hold of someone on their afterhours number, and they had managed to resolve the booking for us. Had we got to the airport the next morning to check in, we would certainly have missed our flight. The trip itself was incredible, but the company has let itself down. My advise, rather use Flight Centre if you must. There is unfortunately, no option for zero stars, otherwise they would have got a zero from me. Pentravel will certainly not see us again.
December 16, 2023
Unprompted review