Hello Peter

So, KDR Travel, after 11 years in business and thousands of clients finally made it onto the mighty Hello Peter website. The sad thing is the report was completely false. Well maybe not sad because it means were reported for no reason.

So why put this page up you might ask? We have been asked about the entry on Hello Peter so we thought we would respond to it on our website rather than on theirs. The hello peter website makes it very easy to put up a complaint but if you would like to respond to it, you have to pay to do that. And i don't mean a nominal R50 admin fee.
They don't care that the person who is complaining is lying. There are no checks in place, post away till your hearts content. Do they care that you may be a competitor looking to make your competition look bad, not at all. Pay up or you can't respond is their attitude. The word extortion springs to mind. Needless to say we decided to respond on our website as we knew we had nothing to hide.

Read more about Hello Peter here.

So Mrs.Fatima X decided to book a trip for her family to the Victoria Falls with us.
She loved our service, we have emails from her saying "What great service Nicky, thank you so much for everything".

Because of the timing of her booking certain seat classes were not available and the price was indeed slightly higher than advertised. ( We have also made bookings for clients where cheaper class fares became available between a quote and a booking and have saved the client by booking those and passing the saving on) After making all the arrangements she then said she found another agent R 2 000 cheaper than us so she cancelled everything. It turned out that the other agent was a friend of hers, who, after she realised had only quoted her on rates and not availability, she then cancelled with and re booked with us.
She then said she understood the reason for the quote going up by R 2 000. KDR Travel always try and quote on what is available at that moment and not just what the cheapest possible fare is, should everything be available. She understood that is what her agent friend had done but her agent friend also had higher accommodation rates than we had secured. We were just happy to have the client back with us and the booking secured.

It all went wrong when she got the vouchers for her trip with details of her flights and accommodation on.

• She then noticed that one of her family members' name was spelt incorrectly.
• We spoke to the airline and their response ( as per usual ) was that a brand new ticket had to be issued and the client could apply for a refund for the other one which can take up to 6 months.
• We told the client the bad news and gave her the exact cost of a new ticket with no markup/ commission or admin fee's on it.
• There were then accusations of KDR just trying to make extra money off them and that we were just greedy.
• We went through the written booking form she had sent us and it was a case of an extra "i" in the 1 name and an "a" instead of an "o" in the other.
• We pointed out to the client that at the top of her invoice email, in size 12 Arial font, we ask the client to please check the spelling of the travellers name is as per their passport before they make payment to us, as airlines have a right to refuse boarding if it is not.
  Now the chances are that because it was a long name it would not have been picked up on boarding but we cannot say that to a client for obvious reasons.
• When the client demanded the director of the company call her, her first words to me were "Do you have Nicky's Bank account details because I might as well just transfer money directly into her account because she is so greedy"
• I explained what had happened and explained that because handwriting can be misread that is why we ask the client to please double check the names in the email before making payment. Her response was that she didn't have time to read emails and that it was all our fault.
• I argued that it clearly wasn't our fault as I had all the correspondence with her and up until her missing the part that asked her to check her name spelling she was incredibly happy with our service. It was was quite a large booking so I offered to meet her halfway with the new ticket and if she got a refund, she could send us the other half then.
• She refused to pay for a thing and then said if we didn't pay for her ticket she would put us on the AskPeter website.
• I asked he if she meant the Hello Peter website.
• She said yes.
• I gave her the website address and thanked her for her time.

She seemed an angry, bitter women who was probably just very upset with herself for making a mistake but it was very unfair of her to put up a half truth on a site Like hello peter that doesn't allow the right to reply without payment up-front.

Have we lost business from it? Possibly. But I also know people who, once they read this page and the Reasons why it's safe to Book with KDR Travel were pleased with our honesty and we secured their business. So she may have done us a favor...

If you do have any problems with a booking or service at KDR Travel please do not hesitate to contact me. Leave your details on our admin contact form and I will call you back.