Episode 10 Rip Off Britain

We asked you who has left you feeling ripped off

when it comes to your holidays,

and you came back with a catalogue of travel disasters.

It was absolutely gutting.

You know, we just...

We thought that's it, we've lost our money.

Never in my life have I experienced anything like that.

It... I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

So, whether it's a deliberate rip-off, a simple mistake

or a catch in the small print, we'll find out why you're out of pocket -

and what you can do about it.

Your stories, your money.

This is Rip-off Britain.

Hello and welcome to another very sunny edition of Rip-off Britain,

where for this series we've based ourselves on the sunny island

of Lanzarote to talk about all things holiday-related.

And, today, as we look into more of the stories that you've asked us

to investigate on your behalf, we have some very,

very big names in our sights.

Indeed, they are some of the best-known names in the business.

But whether it's a company that's been around for decades

or even one that's relatively new on the scene,

it's their experience or their specialist knowledge in

organising holidays that's probably made you want to travel with

these companies in the first place.

So, I'm sure you'd like to think that, when it comes to

getting it right, they would be the very ones to do it.

You really, really would.

But, as you'll see from the cases we're about to hear,

booking with a familiar name is no guarantee that all will go to plan.

You would hope, however, that if something does go wrong,

a bigger or well-established company might be better geared up

to putting things right.

Well, let's see if that's always the case.

Coming up - how fraudsters have hijacked what's become

one of the biggest success stories in travel.

And used it to snaffle money for accommodation that doesn't exist.

I was absolutely devastated when I found out that we'd been scammed.

Because £850 is a lot of money.

And which big name has rooms that some guests claim are so grubby

they've had to clean them up themselves?

There was dirt on the floor.

The oven hadn't been cleaned since...I don't know when.

In that pan, you would never have dreamed of cooking anything in it.

Now, when a holiday goes wrong, all too often the most frustrating part

is simply that you haven't got what you paid for.

So, when you've gone to the trouble of selecting a particular hotel,

suddenly being told that you'll be staying somewhere else

is the very last thing you want to hear.

Especially if that news comes too late for you to do

anything about it.

But how can it be that such a basic part of your holiday

can be changed right at the very last minute?

I'm afraid that's the question that the people in our next film

have been left asking as well.

Menorca gets close to 3,000 hours of sunshine every year.

And it was the climate and beautiful beaches, and less-developed feel,

that appealed to Claire Godfrey and her mum, Elaine, when they were

looking for somewhere to celebrate Elaine's birthday in August 2015.

That's a nice view, isn't it?

Now, the family don't get much free time together because Elaine

is a full-time carer for her partner, Robin, who sadly has dementia.

This holiday meant a lot to me.

A chance to spend time with my family.

Also coming along on the trip were Elaine's other daughter

and son-in-law, and her two granddaughters, 11-year-old Sadie

and Charlotte, who'd be celebrating her 14th birthday

while they were away.

We picked a lovely hotel.

The children wanted one with slides.

So long as the kids are happy when you go on holiday,

you know, you can sort of enjoy the rest of it.

Elaine had found what seemed the perfect resort.

The three-star all-inclusive Carema Playa Resort Hotel,

with package holiday company Cosmos Holidays,

which, at the time, was part of Monarch Holidays.

It looked really nice in the brochure.

It had slides for the children.

It was all-inclusive.

I was looking forward to the slide and the swimming pools and stuff,

because it looked really fun.

Full of excitement as to what lay ahead,

the family jetted off to Menorca.

It was 8:30 at night when we got there.

So, we were just looking to get to the hotel, getting a drink,

beginning the holiday.

Getting some nice warm weather

and just starting to enjoy ourselves, really.

But I'm afraid the jovial mood was about to change.

Because when they touched down at the airport,

the family was handed a letter from Cosmos informing them that

the hotel they were booked in wasn't where they would now be staying.

The letter said that we were going to a new resort

and to a completely different hotel.

And that the board basis was going to be different.

So, my first impression was I was really shocked

they could just do that,

because I didn't know they could just change it when you arrived.

Confused, the family boarded the transfer bus

to their new destination.

It seemed the hotel they'd originally booked

had in fact been overbooked.

However, they were assured that the alternative

they were going to instead was comparable.

But when the next day dawned,

they didn't consider that to be the case at all.

It was a really nice hotel, it was a four-star hotel

but it was a very adult hotel.

If it had been Mum and I by ourselves,

we'd have probably really liked it

but it wasn't really a family sort of hotel.

The hotel didn't have the much-anticipated water slides

and all the family entertainment that Elaine had wanted for the children.

And the fact that it was only half-board and not, as they'd booked,

all-inclusive, meant the costs were quickly ramping up.

We were sort of concerned about Mum, really, cos it was supposed to be

a special birthday treat for her and the rest of the family

were obviously disappointed that we were there.

We just wanted to get the whole matter sorted as quick as we could.

So Claire called the Cosmos Holiday office back in the UK.

I asked them how long they'd been aware of the fact

that the hotel was overbooked

and they said they'd known for three or four days, and I asked them

why they hadn't told us before that and they couldn't answer that.

Claire just couldn't understand why Cosmos had not informed her

of the overbooking problem before they had left the UK,

so that things could have been resolved earlier.

As it was, with the holiday already under way, getting moved to a hotel

with the facilities they'd booked and indeed paid for

wasn't going to be easy.

It took till early afternoon of that first day

and then eventually they rang us back and said they'd found us

another hotel which had water slides and was more appropriate for us.

Sure enough, this one did have water slides and was all-inclusive,

but as a two-star resort,

it fell short of what the family wanted for their holiday.

Well, the water slides and stuff were good for younger kids,

like toddlers and maybe like five-, six-year-olds, but for people

of my age and like my sister, there wasn't really a lot for us to do.

The rooms were very basic with no air conditioning,

which we'd wanted, with it being August.

But we all tried to enjoy, you know, the facilities that were there,

because, you know, we didn't have much option at that time.

-Very poor at night, the entertainment, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

Could have done better myself!

It was all a very far cry from

the three-star birthday treat that Elaine wanted for her family.

I just couldn't stop the tears from coming.

I was just so upset, and thinking that the whole holiday

had been spoiled for us all.

I felt really sorry for her

because it was meant to be for her birthday and things

and when we had just been let down, it spoiled the holiday for her.

Seeing her mum in tears was just the final straw for Claire.

She went online, where she found a more suitable three-star hotel

to stay in.

And after yet more phone calls back to the UK, Cosmos finally

agreed to move them there, nearly three days into their week away.

Even though we enjoyed the last few days,

it just really spoiled the whole thing.

It put a really bad taste on something

that we'd all been really looking forward to.

Once back in the UK,

Claire set about getting some answers from Cosmos Holidays.

And although the family was given £100 per person compensation

and was reimbursed for some of the extra costs that they incurred,

Claire still couldn't understand how their original hotel

could have been overbooked in the first place.

If you were booking theatre tickets,

they wouldn't let you book a seat that wasn't available.

They shouldn't let you book to stay in a hotel.

People are paying a lot of money into it.

Overbooking is surprisingly common in the holiday industry.

Indeed, travel expert Simon Calder says that many hotels do it

deliberately to protect against losses, as indeed do most airlines.

There's many odd things about the holiday industry.

Here you are paying thousands of pounds, in this case, up front,

for a specific trip to a specific hotel and suddenly they turn around

and say, "Oh, yeah, sorry, that one's full." How can that happen?

Well, very easily. Quite often hoteliers will overcommit.

They think, "Oh, well, you know, we always get the no-shows."

And then when the no-shows do show,

well, I'm afraid it all gets very messy,

and the holiday companies will always make sure

in their terms and conditions it says something like,

"Well, if we have to move you, if it's a similar standard of hotel

"in the same resort,

"well, you're just going to have to put up with it."

But when we got in touch with Monarch Holidays,

which has now stopped using the Cosmos brand, it told us

that what happened in this case wasn't deliberate overbooking -

a policy it says it doesn't use.

It told us that sales of plane seats

and hotel rooms are usually capped by the company once places are full

but in this case, due to human error, that didn't happen.

A genuine mistake for which the company apologises.

It stressed it did everything it could to find alternative

accommodation, which is not easy at such a busy time.

But went on to say that it made no excuse for the error which

left Claire and her family so disappointed.

It has now refunded the cost of the holiday in full.

But while that's good news for Claire and her family, it doesn't totally

make up for the fact that the trip

fell so far short of their expectations.

We thought we were getting a really lovely family holiday where we

could all relax and have some quality time together.

Instead we just ended up with everyone upset.

A name that's come from nowhere to revolutionise the way that

millions of people across the globe now take their holidays is Airbnb.

It advertises accommodation not in hotels

but in ordinary people's homes.

Its devotees swear by it

and indeed in many cases now wouldn't stay anywhere any other way.

But it does seem that even Airbnb can't avoid being exploited by scammers

and there are now people who are taking money for places to stay

that either don't exist or that aren't theirs to offer in the first place.

Seven years ago, three guys in San Francisco with a website,

three air mattresses and plenty of ambition transformed

the way many of us now book our holiday accommodation.

On a mission to make travel to even the most expensive places

affordable to all, they created the holiday rental site Airbnb.

The way it's supposed to work is that, rather than pay for a poky hotel room,

in the same city-centre location you can find a three-bedroom apartment,

a house or just a room for the same price or even cheaper.

Here's what the company says in its ads.

It's simple, just enter where you want to go,

the dates you want to be there and choose from thousands of places.

Ros Webb became one of the million Brits to have used the service

when trying to bag herself and four friends an apartment in Amsterdam.

We decided to use Airbnb to book our holidays

because loads of our friends and family had done it before.

They'd all trusted it and had a great experience of it

and we felt it was a really easy way to book an apartment.

From its humble beginnings, Airbnb is now a multibillion-dollar

company, offering two million listings in more than 190 countries.

Their website is clear - "Trust is what makes it work."

'Trust is a massive part of the whole thing, like,

'we trusted in the website to give us a legitimate apartment.'

And Ros soon found an apartment that sounded ideal,

with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a TV in every room

and superfast Wi-Fi, all for £850 for the weekend.

So, keen to secure the flat, she contacted the owner,

or as Airbnb calls them the "host", through the site.

Here's the listing of Julia's apartment.

It has a photograph of Julia on there.

Having a photo of Julia definitely made us feel more secure, to be able

to picture who we were dealing with and who we were booking with.

When a few hours passed with no response from Julia, Ros was worried

that she might miss out on the perfect apartment for their stay.

But, looking at the Airbnb listing again,

she saw that Julia said that the quickest way to contact her

was via her direct e-mail address, which she included in the ad.

So Ros quickly fired off a message.

She was really quick to respond.

She let us know that she was available

and she was keen for us to come and stay.

We let her know we wanted to and we booked it.

Shortly after that, Ros received an e-mail booking confirmation

which she THOUGHT came directly from Airbnb.

It requested that she pay by bank transfer to an Airbnb

holding account, the money only to be released

when her group had the keys to the apartment.

All of which to Ros seemed entirely plausible.

It's got the Airbnb logo at the top.

It had all the same typography

that it has on all the other web pages and e-mails.

At the bottom, they signed it Airbnb.

So, confident that she was sending her money to an Airbnb account,

Ros transferred the £850 to secure the apartment.

Just a few hours later, concerned that she hadn't received any

confirmation, she called Airbnb to find out why.

They didn't give us any answer we needed, apart from that we

didn't have any bookings with them and that's all they could tell us.

It was then that Ros realised she'd been duped.

I was absolutely devastated when I found out that we had been

scammed, because £850 is a lot of money.

Airbnb told Ros that, as she'd contacted

the host by a personal e-mail address and had made the payment

outside its own platform, it wasn't liable for the fraud.

The response that I got from Airbnb was just gutting.

They'd not taken any ownership for the fact that,

if we hadn't gone onto their website,

we wouldn't have found the listing

and we wouldn't have booked with Julia.

What's more, Ros was shocked to find that the Amsterdam apartment

was still listed on the Airbnb site the next day.

The listing wasn't taken down until eight o'clock the next morning.

We informed them at half seven the night before.

That's a good 12 hours later,

that's plenty of time for more people to have got scammed.

And while the Airbnb site does have advice on how to book securely

and safely, and would have displayed a warning telling Ros

not to pay the hosts directly,

Ros doesn't think that the risks are made sufficiently clear.

I don't think there's enough warnings on the Airbnb site at all.

As soon as you go onto their home page,

there should be a big warning saying, "Do not bank transfer,

"only pay through our website," and that should be every way.

Some experts have questioned

whether the company should be going further to protect their customers.

Our technology expert David McClelland

took a look at the Airbnb site to see if he thinks

the warnings against fraud are currently clear.

So, there's certainly nothing on the front page here.

At the bottom, there's a Trust & Safety page,

but still, there's nothing here.

Where you can find the statement on how you ARE supposed to use Airbnb

is in the terms and conditions,

so if we just click on...

Where is that on here?

But, sure enough, those warnings are made in the Ts & Cs.

What's more, they're repeated on the payments page,

which Ros would have seen when she was making her booking.

Basically, it's saying that you have

to pay using Airbnb's own payment platform,

and if you do go outside of that,

then any fraud, it's kind of down to you.

-Here we go.

-Thank you.

Meanwhile, the scammer Ros came up against wasn't

quite finished with her. Even after taking her cash,

Julia made contact a few days later,

asking her to log on to Airbnb via a link to view her unread messages.

Suspicious, Ros consulted her dad, who works in IT,

for his advice.

My dad checked the coding, realised it had been tampered with,

so...and this is where she would have read all my files

and all my login information for Airbnb.

He made me change my Facebook password, my Gmail password,

just everything, just to make sure I was definitely safe.

Wise precautions, but Lauren Dudley from Sussex wasn't so lucky.

As a regular user of Airbnb, Lauren, too,

had planned a trip to Amsterdam,

but the day before she was due to travel, she discovered she had

also been the victim of a scam.

She lost the £502 that she'd paid by bank transfer

to the person that she thought owned the property.

And while Airbnb gave her a credit note

when she returned to the UK,

she discovered that the fraudsters had hacked her Airbnb account

and used her profile to advertise bogus listings on the website.

She started to receive e-mails from people

enquiring about a flat in London, which she knew nothing about.

We contacted Airbnb to see what it's doing

to combat fraud on its site.

It told us that it works proactively to advise site users

to only message advertisers

and make payments through the site itself,

"where their money is secure".

And Airbnb told us

that it's recently rolled out a variety of extra security measures,

including a very clear warning that site users should...

..which now appears next to every message thread between guests

and hosts on the site.

Airbnb said that it has also introduced

anonymised e-mail addresses,

so, as long as you communicate via the website,

phoney advertisers can't harvest your e-mail

and use it for further scams.

Airbnb was also keen to emphasise that 60 million people

have used its website and problems are extremely rare.

They said it is in "close contact" with our case studies

and are providing "full support".

Ros and her friends did eventually get their trip to Amsterdam,

but she's learned a hard lesson about making payments in the future.

'I'll be so much more careful when I'm booking a holiday.

'I'll do it by credit card, where I have the protection,'

or by PayPal, or any other ways.

I will never, ever bank-transfer again.

Still to come on Rip Off Britain -

the toxic haze that led to this couple's dream holiday going

up in smoke. Could they have been told in advance?

The warning to wear facemasks, the fact they'd closed schools,

sent children home because it was so bad...

Rip-Off Britain is on the road again

and this time we're in Nottingham.

Our pop-up shop is full of experts, on hand to give free, expert

advice to anyone that drops in.

And Simon Calder was in the heart of the shopping centre with a quiz.

This is all about motoring in Europe and what you are going to need

if you're not going to break the law. And so

what I've got here is my good old suitcase full of stuff.

Let's start off by saying,

-where is it compulsory to have one of these in the car?

-Spain?

-Spain, very good.

-Have you driven in Spain?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Is that why you knew?

-Yeah.

-Did you have one in the car?

-Had one in the car, and I take my own car, so...

-Perfect.

When you get a rental car, normally they pack one in, don't they?

OK, what have we got here?

Well, you know what this is.

-But where is it compulsory to have one of these?

-France?

No, quite a lot of things are compulsory in France...

-Do we have a guess?

-Belgium?

-Jane, that's fantastic.

-How did you guess that?

-It's just a guess.

-Give that woman a lemon!

-Fantastic, I'll give you a fire extinguisher!

-Congratulations. Look at that.

-Why is it essential in that country?

No, it's not... Actually,

if you're taking your own car you don't need one of those,

but if you've got a locally registered car, for instance

a rental car, you absolutely have to make sure that you have

a fire extinguisher in there.

I have two things left in my box of tricks,

one of them can just be thrown away.

You can probably guess which one it is. But you've got to tell me why.

-Paper driving licence.

-The green counterpart.

So, this is the thing that has all your motoring misdeeds listed on it.

And up until June in 2015

you needed this to prove that you were a good driver, particularly

when you're renting cars, but as of 8 June 2015

you can chuck it in the bin.

Instead you've got to go online

and get your motoring record printed out.

You can only get a certificate valid for 72 hours,

so if you're flying out to Florida,

the night before - get your certificate and take it over there.

-Do you always take your driving licence with you?

-I have done.

-Yeah.

Did you know you've got to print it out on the computer now?

No, I didn't know that.

I hope that if you do go driving, anywhere at all,

-that you have safe trips and a happy holiday.

-Thank you.

Thanks for taking part in our quiz. ALL: Thank you.

Ever since the 1930s, holiday parks along the British coast have

been a popular choice for families heading to the seaside.

And one name in particular has weathered ups, downs

and changes in management to remain synonymous with

the traditional bucket-and-spade vacation.

Pontins was founded back in 1946, and in its current guise

the company likes to boast of outstanding value for money.

It says no-one can beat it on price.

That's all well and good, but some of you reckon

that rock-bottom price sometimes might mean

certain other parts of the holiday may be compromised along the way.

MUSIC: Blue Suede Shoes by Elvis Presley

What do Bobby Davro, Shane Ritchie, Lee Mack

and Bradley Walsh have in common?

Well, each of them earned their showbiz stripes as Bluecoats,

the people that bring the fun

and entertainment to Pontins holiday parks.

Pontins first opened its doors more than half a century ago,

when Fred Pontin turned a disused army camp at Brean Sands

in Somerset into a holiday park.

But fast-forward several decades, and according to the e-mails

quite a few of you have sent us,

Pontins Brean Sands seems to have lost its shine.

Sarah Darnley is just one of the disappointed Pontins

customers who got in touch with us,

after she and her husband stayed there in 2014 with her son Jack

and her parents.

We'd never been to Pontins before.

We knew that there was a lot to do in the area, so we thought...

It was the middle of the six-week holiday

and we thought it was a break away for us all.

They'd bought the holiday from someone on Facebook who couldn't go any more.

And when they'd gone onto the Pontins website

to see what the park had to offer,

they'd been delighted by the photos and promised facilities.

We looked at the website and it looked good, they'd got a big adventure playground,

quad bikes, go-karts - it looked really, really nice.

The apartments looked clean, they looked nice.

And we thought, "Yeah, we've made the right decision."

With a basic price of just £325 for the family of five's week-long stay,

Sarah could even afford

an extra £50 to upgrade their accommodation.

We looked on the website and decided that we should upgrade,

it'd give us more room, there was a better layout at the apartments.

Everything was included.

Two weeks later, the family set off

on the three-hour drive to the Somerset coast.

But when they got there, the family didn't feel the sight

they were greeted with quite matched the pictures they'd seen online.

First impressions when we walked in was, "What the hell have we done?

"What have we booked, what have we paid for?"

These are some pictures of the apartment that we were in.

And they don't... There's nothing at all like their brochure and website.

The family weren't expecting five-star luxury,

especially at that price,

but they felt what they got was a little too basic for comfort.

When we actually arrived, there was flies

and spiders in the skylight in the bathroom.

There was chips out of the table,

there was rust up all the table legs.

The fridge was just all iced up, you couldn't use it.

The furniture was broken, there was dirt on the floor.

The oven hadn't been cleaned since...I don't know when.

And that pan, you would never have

dreamed of cooking anything in it without it being thoroughly cleaned.

The Darnleys complained and asked to be moved into a different apartment,

but things didn't get much better.

You would've thought, if they were putting us into a different apartment,

they would have cleaned it, but it was exactly the same.

Sarah complained again,

but was told there were no other options available.

So the family felt they had no choice

but to put things right themselves.

We just went out to the local shop and got cleaning products

and cleaned it ourselves.

After establishing there was nowhere else in the area with any vacancies,

the Darnleys decided to stay put and make the best of it.

And headed out to see what the rest of the park had to offer.

But it soon became apparent that not all the advertised activities

were available.

We had a walk around the park,

we quickly discovered there were no go-karts there,

there was no quad bikes, there was no adventure playground, as it had

described in the brochure.

While Jack did enjoy the swimming pool and arcade,

without the activities they'd seen advertised on the website,

the family found themselves spending as much time as they could

outside the Pontins park.

We spent from morning until night away from Pontins,

we literally went back to sleep, and that was it.

When they returned home, the family complained to Pontins by e-mail.

But that was back in August 2014.

And when we filmed with them over a year later

they said they still hadn't had a reply.

We've had no response at all from Pontins, from their head office

or from Britannia Hotels, who are meant to own them.

They don't want to know.

When the Britannia Hotel group took over Pontins in 2011,

promising a Disney-style makeover as part of a £25 million overhaul,

hopes were high for the future of

one of the UK's best-known holiday parks.

But five years later,

if the complaints we've received are anything to go by,

the company is still some way from achieving its ambitions -

especially at Brean Sands.

Joanne Loveridge stayed there in June 2015.

She told us she'd been shocked by the standards of hygiene

on the site.

And when Pat Cohen visited the park in August 2015,

she too spent some of her holiday cleaning.

And this video she took at the time shows exactly what she found.

In fact, hygiene and a general sense of scruffiness

are at the heart of most of the complaints we've received

about this particular Pontins site over the last couple of years.

But when we contacted Britannia Hotels, which owns Pontins,

we were met with a resounding silence.

The company didn't respond to any of our calls or e-mails.

Jack...

As for the Darnleys,

they won't be going back to Pontins any time soon.

We were looking forward to it as a family, going away.

And when we got there, it was just horrendous.

Never again will we go to Pontins.

Our travel expert Simon Calder is sharing his top tips

on favourite destinations across the globe.

This time - Benidorm.

Benidorm's sandy white beaches are the top attraction in this

incredibly popular resort.

They may get busy, but you'll almost always manage to find a space

and there's no charge to get the sand between your toes.

Don't just lie there in the sun.

Join in with some of the regular exercise classes on the beach.

They're free.

And you might want to do a few more fitness classes after you've

taken up his next tip.

Don't be a Charlie, go to the chocolate factory.

Just 18 minutes by train from Benidorm takes you to

the lovely fishing village of Villajoyosa.

Close to the station there's a factory, where they do tours

and samples, and it won't cost you a cocoa bean!

-JULIA:

-With an average of 200 new visitors arriving every hour,

every day of the year,

Benidorm predictably attracts a fair number of scammers.

But pre-warned is pre-armed.

Let me help you with that, sir.

Be wary of offers of help from official-looking people

when you're picking up your rental car.

As with any transport terminal, never take your eyes

off your belongings for a second or you might never see them again.

Now, if you've decided to book your holiday not online

but from a travel agent,

what sort of information about your destination

do you expect they're going to give you?

You might hope, for example, you're going to get not just sound advice

but the latest on anything that might create

a problem at the time you're going away.

But the couple at the heart of our next story

say that wasn't the experience they had

when they booked their dream getaway.

And by the way, they hadn't gone to just any old travel agent.

They'd picked one with a reputation for being a real

specialist in trips that are a cut above the rest.

Borneo - tropical rainforest and spectacular landscapes.

Not so long ago, it was an unexplored wilderness

where very few tourists ventured.

But now the Indo-Malaysian island attracts something like

three million holiday-makers a year.

And Stacy Kitchen and Graham Parker couldn't wait to see it for themselves.

This was going to be a very special trip for us.

We've never spent that amount of money on a trip before.

So we were looking forward to what would be a holiday of a lifetime.

In June 2015, they turned to a travel agent who

specialised in exactly the sort of trip they were looking for.

We chose Kuoni because they've been voted

the world's leading travel company

and we just felt that we could trust them.

You know, the tour would be well set up

and we would be in very safe hands.

Kuoni put together a package for the couple that was

a mixture of rainforest and beaches,

taking in five internal flights across the vast island.

The lady in the store was very helpful.

She'd done the tour before herself so we felt in good hands.

She was adamant that Borneo would be perfect in September.

This would be a great place to go.

Convinced they were getting just what they wanted,

the couple booked the £5,500 trip,

and in September, flew to the East Asian island,

where things began exactly as they'd hoped,

with a visit to see the wildlife that Borneo's most famous for.

Seeing the orang-utans for the first time in a natural habitat live

was very, very special.

It was a mother and a baby and we were very close,

very, very close with our cameras.

It was really, really wonderful.

But that first stop would prove to be

the only part of the itinerary they'd get to see.

The next morning, on arriving at the airport to catch their first

internal flight, there was no plane waiting for them.

Flights from Kuching were being grounded

because of a thick haze that meant visibility was heavily reduced.

You couldn't actually see the runway.

We just saw smoke-filled haze the entire time.

It was like a thick smog.

Eventually a replacement plane was organised

and the couple boarded a flight to their next destination, Mulu,

hopeful that they could leave the haze behind.

But two hours into the flight, there was a problem.

The pilot tells us that he can't land.

It's totally impossible to see the airport, he can't see to land,

-we're going to have to go back...

-To where we started.

-..to Kuching.

You might think that the haze they'd come across was just bad luck.

But next morning the couple went back to the airport,

hoping to get their trip back on track.

But it quickly became clear that their experience the previous day

wasn't simply a one-off.

So at breakfast we get the Borneo Post,

their national newspaper,

and the front-page story is all the forest fires,

the poor air quality.

Stacy and Graham had inadvertently found themselves caught up

in a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Southeast Asian Haze.

It's an annual occurrence, the result of mass deforestation,

where vast areas of forest are set alight,

to make way for the new plantations.

This year's fires were particularly bad,

not only grounding planes

but making hundreds of thousands of people ill.

The warning to wear facemasks, the fact that they'd closed schools,

sent children home, because it was just...poor for your health.

We knew then that this would have a major impact

on the rest of our Borneo trip.

We had lots of internal flights to come,

and we knew that this was going to be a problem.

The fires had started in June,

and Mulu, the place Stacy and Graham were trying to fly to,

had hit local headlines in August, when the smoke from the fires began

making visibility and breathing more difficult.

As the fires took hold, on September the 4th, days before the couple

travelled, six Indonesian provinces had declared a state of emergency.

With the haze affecting the whole area,

Graham phoned the nearest Kuoni rep for advice.

He suggested that the couple take an alternative route that would

start with them flying to a destination that wasn't

on the original itinerary,

from where a revised tour would be arranged.

When pressed to provide more details on the next steps of the journey,

Graham says the Kuoni rep seemed unable to offer a concrete plan.

And with the haze seemingly getting worse,

the couple felt that their holiday was slipping away from them.

You've gone on this trip of a lifetime,

and slowly the realisation is that you could even

endanger your own health because it was so bad.

So without what they considered a clear alternative plan

or any further advice from Kuoni in the UK,

and all the while, of course, increasingly spooked

by the number of people wearing masks to keep out the haze,

when the airline at Kuching suggested it would be able to fly them home to London,

the couple made a reluctant decision.

When we had the option to fly back to London,

it was the last option we wanted to take.

-It absolutely was the last option.

-Devastating.

Once back on UK soil, the couple started to question

why everything had gone so badly wrong.

With the haze from forest fires a regular occurrence at the time of year they'd planned to visit,

they wondered why no-one from Kuoni had mentioned this might be a risk.

After all, Graham and Stacy had particularly turned to Kuoni's

expertise to provide them with a tailor-made trip

and so were astonished that no-one from the company had even mentioned

an event that had, for the last few years, become news around the world.

We were very, very surprised,

shocked, that we were not told about these forest fires,

that apparently are burnt at this time every year,

and I can't believe that Kuoni are not aware of this.

And, not only that, it was being reported around the world,

it was actually worldwide, global knowledge.

Adding to their frustration, Kuoni said that

because the couple had chosen to return to the UK

when an alternative route was being discussed,

they were not entitled to any refund.

But as far as Stacy and Graham are concerned,

leaving Borneo had been the only viable option.

We had to make a decision, we had no-one to ask,

no-one there with us, no-one who was easy to contact.

In the end, after two days at an airport,

you have to make a decision.

The couple was eventually offered a refund of £691,

which Kuoni told them was for the unused elements of their holiday,

as well as £250 in vouchers towards another trip with the company.

But with the holiday costing £5,500,

this was far from what they were hoping for.

Had Kuoni told us about the conditions in Borneo,

we would never have gone.

And it's the fact that no mention at all of the haze was made

that has disappointed the couple the most.

After all, the specialist knowledge they were hoping Kuoni would provide

was one of the reasons they booked with the company in the first place.

So just how much responsibility does a travel agent have to make sure

their customers are told everything about the place

to which they're flying?

And are Stacy and Graham right in thinking

they should have been warned about the haze?

Well, we looked at ten travel agents who specialise in trips to Borneo

to see if they warned against visiting at any particular time.

Only one of them warned about the haze on its website

and when we rang the other nine,

only one of those mentioned that it could be a problem.

But travel expert Simon Calder thinks that any company

offering trips to this area should be warning customers

about something that, for more than a decade,

has been an annual occurrence and can impact on travel.

Very sadly, these forest fires are an annual event.

I love Borneo, but I only ever go there during the wet season,

from December to April, when the air is a little bit clearer.

I think any holiday company thinking of sending people to

Borneo in the dry season should warn them,

"Look, this isn't a brilliant time of year."

But when we contacted Kuoni about Stacy and Graham's case,

it told us that the haze is not something

that ordinarily impacts on people's holidays

and that, although it was particularly bad this year,

the company's nonetheless received extremely positive feedback

from people on the same tour immediately before,

during and after Stacy and Graham's trip.

The company added that it does always try to advise people

ahead of time if there is advance warning about a situation

that will affect their trip but pointed out

that extraordinary events and extreme weather

can disrupt holidays without warning.

And it went on to say that its local representative in Borneo

did offer Stacy and Graham an alternative route to a region

almost free of any haze,

something it did for a number of other customers.

Although when we put that to Stacy and Graham,

they maintained that they were not offered a particular alternative

route and, having paid extra for a private tour, felt they were

alone with no support, which is why they made the decision to come home.

And they remain disappointed that their trip of a lifetime

never really got off the ground.

I feel let down by Kuoni.

It was a complete shock when we were there, a complete surprise,

and it makes me very, very cross.

-JULIA:

-If you've got a story you'd like us to investigate,

you can get in touch with us via our Facebook page,

BBC Rip Off Britain,

our website...

or e-mail...

Or if you'd rather send us a letter,

then our address is...

Well, whether they're at home or abroad, a two-week break

or simply a few snatched days away,

holidays really represent precious time to relax

and soak up new sights.

So when you don't get to do that in the way you'd expected,

it really can be the most devastating disappointment.

And I can truly sympathise with people who say the big

companies sometimes forget that point, can't you?

I totally agree.

Loss of enjoyment is really pretty hard to quantify

but if you've been looking forward to something all year

which then turns out not to be quite what you'd paid for,

well, that really is a big deal.

So I'm genuinely disappointed to hear stories of people arriving abroad

and finding that, instead of staying in the hotel that

they'd specifically chosen, they now have to go somewhere else.

Every one of us can understand the frustration in a situation like that.

Absolutely, and even with companies who've been around for years,

often it's only when disappointed customers bring their grievances

to us that they're able to get them finally resolved.

Good old Rip Off Britain!

Well, we can't promise to help with all your problems

but where we can we'll try and give it a go.

So keep your stories coming

and we'll be back to investigate more of them very soon.

-Until then, from all of us, goodbye.

-Bye.

-Bye-bye.