Equestrian Escapes; Music Festival Holidays Worst company I've ever dealt with Duddon, Tarporley, Chesire

In 2013 I, my partner and a friend booked a travel package with a company called Equestrian Escapes, based in England. This is highly disorganised, extremely unethical  organisation. The same company also operates a business called Music Festival Holidays. 

Our travel package was supposed to cover travel from London to Normandy to attend the 2014 World Equestrian Games, accommodation in Nomandy at a campsite called Port’land, located at Port-en-Bessin-Huppain, travel to and from the games from the campsite each day, tickets to specifc events at the Games

When we first enquired about their travel packages on the 7^th June 2013, Equestrian Escapes told us the cost would be £1,750 per person. This included all of the above, with three people sharing a 4 person cabin at Port’land campsite.

By the 11^th June 2013, we were told “we are selling very fast and now we have no availability for the lower level of cabin accommodation (we originally quoted on this). We are now selling our second level of accommodation”. The additional cost for the second level of accommodation was £1200 in total for three people sharing a cabin. We naturally assumed this meant that the accommodation would be upgraded from the base level cabins available. In fact, the campground has 5 levels of cabin accommodation in addition to camping sites. On its website, these are clearly identified, with 5 different price levels.  The cottages are differentiated by name, and the lowest level cottage /mobile home has three different types – Juno, Omaha and Utah. These were all charged at the same lowest price point. The owner of the campsite clearly believed that Juno, Omaha and Utah were comparable in quality, and of lower quality/size than the other cottages available. When we arrived at Portland, despite having been charged £1200 for an upgrade, we were allocated to Utah, which is one of the lowest price cottages.

We have on 4 separate occasions complained to Equestrian Escapes about being placed in this cabin this, requesting first, while we were there,  an upgrade to the level of acommodation we had paid for, and then after the games, a refund, and all on 4 occasions have been totally ignored.

We established, by talking to the owners of Port’land, that Equestrian Escpaes made a block booking of some of the cabins, and decided that they would nomiate a small number of the cheapest cottages as the base level cottages, and would call all other cottages, including a number of the cheapest cottages, an upgrade.

I regard this as outright fraud – they claimed they were proving upgraded accommodation, charged a large premium for doing so, with no intention of providing anything other than the cheapest accommodation available.

In addition to this, they were remarkably disorganised with their travel arrangements, being totally incapbale of estimating how long it would take to travel anywhere, and completely lacking in the ability to determine if they had the right number of people on each bus, to say nothing of whether they were in fact the right people. To explain all the things they managed to get wrong would be a very long story - suffice to say, YOU SHOUL AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS.