FlyGlobespan.com
Very poor customer service

We were Premium Economy customers but on check-in at Gatwick Premium check in desk actually took far longer than economy. The flight was 2 ½ hours late in leaving, but there was no explanation as to why this happened.

When we booked the flight back in October we deliberately chose that flight because it was direct – in February we received notification that it was going via Calgary. We pre-booked our seats in January, but when we got to the plane we were told the ground staff had the wrong seat plan “so just choose where you want to sit”. The crew didn’t seem know what to do – they said it was all the ground staff’s fault and there was a lot of shrugging of shoulders.

The toilet in Premium stopped working after its first visitor, after not very long there were only two toilets working and then an hour before Calgary we were told that none of the toilets were working on the entire plane! This is obviously totally unacceptable on any flight, let alone a long haul flight.

During the flight, an announcement was made that there wasn’t enough meals for the passengers and the flight crew had to give up theirs, and the drinks ran out, leaving only water to be served.

We were prepared to give the company the benefit of the doubt, that neosair were new to the route and therefore it was only teething problems. How wrong we were – it got worse on the return flight. Checking in at Vancouver Airport, there were just three desks open for Globespan customers – none of which were marked for Premium Economy passengers. So people were queuing in the wrong place, which meant we lost another of the benefits of paying extra for Premium tickets. Our boarding pass showed we would be boarding through gate 54, when looking at the airport information boards it then said we would be boarding through gate 64, the airport information boards then changed to gate 54. A BA flight was on the stand and ready to depart at 20.30 – so our flight obviously wasn’t going to take off at 20.45 – but again, nobody told anyone what was going on – where our flight was, how long it was going to be delayed, and which gate we should be boarding from. No announcements were made until the passengers started kicking up a fuss and finally an announcement was made after our flight should have departed. The flight was obviously late when we checked in – why weren’t we told earlier?

It was also on check-in that we found the flight was going via Glasgow, we had deliberately booked a direct flight – why weren’t we notified of the change. I regularly checked our booking online, and there was no notification to the seat plan changes or the stop-over on the way home in Glasgow. On checking in we mentioned we’d pre-booked our seats and were told we had booked two aisle seats – we pointed out that that was not the case according to the plan we’d booked on the Globespan website. Apparently the seating arrangement had been changed – again why were we not told?

The flight was actually delayed for five hours by the time we eventually took off – which again was caused by the wrong seat plan for the plane, so all Premier seat bookings were wrong. Some people had been allocated seats that actually didn’t exist on the actual plane. We had seats J and K on our boarding card, there were no K seats on the flight.

Again the cabin crew did not know how to resolve the problem and their poor English only frustrated passengers further. Indeed, they showed a total indifference to the situation which was as unprofessional as it was personally insulting to paying customers who had spent the last seven or eight hours sitting in a departure lounge. It was only when the Captain announced on the intercom for people to sit down “anywhere on the plane” that we were able to take off. We even had an announcement on the plane in Italian – which makes you wonder what would happen in an emergency situation.

When we landed in Glasgow, we were then held on the tarmac for a further two hours because the Glasgow luggage hadn’t been separated from the London Gatwick luggage, so all the bags had to be removed from the plane, checked and re-loaded.

I have had no reply from e-mails or letters sent to Globespan and when I contacted ABTA I was told that Globespan had resigned and were no longer ABTA members.

Company: FlyGlobespan.com
Country: United Kingdom
Region: United Kingdom

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