Foreign Perspectives

Most booking sites send contact details for the guests when the booking is received but this one doesn’t and in fact all we get is an arrival date and a name.

When this couple arrived they started by complaining that I didn’t know the flight arrival times to Girona airport. Actually, we do. They’re from about 7am to midnight every day and we even check actual arrival times for guests as there have been considerable delays of late. Still, they didn’t accept my explanation that we’d not been told of their arrival time so added that to the complaint letter. We’re still at a bit of a loss as to how anyone would have told us though as they booked the flight separately from the accommodation so the place they booked us through didn’t know when they were arriving either.

But then it gets a bit surreal. They’d asked me after checking in about eating that night and I’d said that they’d have needed to eat in Spain as all French restaurants stop serving around 8.30pm and after that it’s McDonalds or nothing. Quite a big part of their complaint was that I didn’t give them any information about eating out that night. Of course, that’s because they couldn’t eat out that night as it was about 9.30pm by the time they arrived. However, as they’d not adjusted their watches they figured that it was only a little after 8pm.

It’s even worse than that though as they somehow managed to stay most of a week in France without adjusting their watches so had quite a run of difficulties over that time, most of which they seemed to be blaming on us. When they came down at 11am for breakfast, it had been cleared away (that being 10am for them, of course), when they went for lunch at 2pm (1pm for them), the restaurants were closed, etc. Actually, they STILL haven’t realised that they were running an hour behind the rest of France despite having to run for the plane as they arrived just as the checkin for their flight closed.

Slightly more comical was their complaint about the antiquated hairdryer being a bit smelly. In fact, it was the room heater that they were using and the smell was the burning of their own hair.

So when you get off a flight, do check what the local time is.