Paul said,

February 28, 2007 @ 12:34 am

Below is my email reply to Peter.
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Date – Feb 23, 2007 8:27 PM
Subject – Response to blog post on Pauked.com

Peter,

I believe you commented on my blog regarding a post about your recent Valentines email (http://blog.pauked.com/?p=380).

Thank you for your apologies, but unfortunately they do not rectify the fact that the problems we had with your service did spoil the beginning and end of our wedding and honeymoon. To make a mistake once is forgivable, but to do it again, repeatedly is not. So I will try to explain the issues we had and also, for reference, I’ve listed the details of our booking at the end of my email. I didn’t note them on my blog, because they were not strictly relevant.

The taxi for our outbound journey was late because of roadworks on the M66 and therefore the driver had to take an alternate route via Bury to both pick us up and take us to the airport. As such the issue in this instance was twofold. Firstly we were not informed of the delay and the first we knew about it was when we rang yourselves after the taxi was half an hour late.

Secondly when the taxi was near to our address, the driver could not find our home. I did try giving some directions, but I will admit, I’m not the greatest at that. This continued for a while whilst the driver kept ringing back to ask again for further directions (I cannot remember the number of times). It got to the point where the driver said something along the lines of “oh I will find you” that I decided it was best for him to stay put at a known location and that I would drive up to him and have him follow me back. It is a good job that we booked the taxi to arrive very early and that there were also delays at the airport when checking in, because we were late.

Had the taxi just been late and that was the only problem we had had, then that would have been fair enough and forgivable.

However, for the inbound journey there was no taxi at all. My wife rang yourselves after we’d collected our luggage to confirm our pickup. There was then some confusion at your end due to a “computer problem” and we were told we were not expected to arrive back until the following day. By this time we were very upset and frustrated. My wife explained the problems we had on our outbound journey to which she was told “we don’t know anything about it”. We were then told to go for a drink and that we would be called back to let us know what the situation was. The taxi then arrived over an hour later and was an Astra estate from King’s Taxi’s in Burnley.

Note that there were four adults (myself, my wife and my grandparents), all with luggage. As you can imagine it was a squeeze getting in the taxi. For reference our outbound taxi was a Ford Transit mini van and we had paid extra for exclusive transport (I’m aware that you could say it was in both cases, but an Astra estate is pushing it).

As I mentioned previously, the driver was very unprofessional. He seemed extremely nervous and was sweating profusely and constantly wiping his brow. My wife and grandparents were sat in the back of the taxi and were not given the chance to buckle up properly. He then drove at speeds of over 100mph on the motorway and was very aggressive. He was tailgating cars in front and effectively forcing them to pull in. My wife told him to slow down, and he duly did, but to speeds of 80 to 90mph. Not the sort of speeds you should going at in a fully loaded vehicle with 4 passengers.

I would have thought that given the previous problems on our outbound journey, the driver would have been told to give an excellent level of service in order to at least minimise the damage caused. Unfortunately not. The only good thing that can be noted is that our journey home was quick! At the time I did make a note of taxi’s number, but unfortunately do not have this anymore (my wife gave this when she complained at the time).

I would also like to point out an incident that unfortunately further compounded these problems. Two weeks before our honeymoon I was in a car crash on the way to work, whereby my car was written off. So when I had to go find the taxi driver I had to use my grandparents car when I would have preferred not to and I think you’ll also appreciate that on the return journey I was aghast with the driver’s behaviour.

Given that both journeys were not satisfactory, we were not particularly happy to just receive half of our money back. As is plainly obvious, I was fuming at the time I posted to my blog (and to a degree I still am now). The Valentines email was pretty much the icing on the cake given the level of service we’d received. So yes, I would like to be removed from your mailing list and database.

Whilst I am interested to hear your side of the story, I’m not entirely sure there is anything you can do. I will note however that we were pleased that the complaint was taken seriously, but hope that nobody ever has to go through what we did.

Regards,
Paul Healey

**snip – booking details removed**