Hotels.com Rewards adds an avoidable £4 reward booking fee

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• Cat says:

  26 Sep26 September 17:34

  I highly recommend you board the Caledonian Sleeper with lowered expectations BJ. Remember the service is run by Serco – expect a mind-boggling omnishambles. Indian railways run a far more reliable service.
  With lowered expectations, you may be able to enjoy the views!

  • BJ says:

    26 Sep26 September 19:45

    Yes, I think I read they recently fired the cleaning contractors for the state of the trains, and there are strike issues too. However, hopefully with new coaches the experience will be good for a while at least. I read the Chinese-built sleeper trains Thai railways bought about three years ago are excellent so we are planing to try those out on a trip to Chiang Mai next summer.

    • Cat says:

      26 Sep26 September 20:02

      My issues were more with the fact that they left Euston an hour earlier than the time given on the schedule at the time of booking, which was also the time on my ticket. At no point did anyone email me or phone me or try to contact me in any way to notify me of the time change. The only reason we made the train was that we’d been told it was worth arriving super early in order to nab a table in the restaurant car. We got there an hour and 10 mins early. You’ve never seen anyone use those damned ticket machines so fast, and I felt like an asthmatic Usain Bolt after the run for the train. No tables left in the restaurant car though.
      Others weren’t so lucky – they’d bought tickets when the train was supposed to be departing from KX at the later time. Nobody updated them either. They didn’t make it.
      They then tried to deposit us in the middle of nowhere in the Highlands, to catch a rail replacement bus. When it hadn’t turned up 15 mins later, they let us back on the train, shivering, and carried on. They then deposited us in Oban, rather than Fort William and told us to wait for the rail replacement bus. Had someone told us it was going to take an hour, we’d have hidden from the mid February sleet in the nearby hotel bar. Sadly that would have required the ability to arrange a p!ss-up in a brewery.

      • Cat says:

        26 Sep26 September 20:06

        Also, I sent a complaint email every month or so, for a year and a half, hoping someone would eventually reply. When I finally got a reply, it was to say that it was too late to pay any sort of compensation now.
        It was an absolute clusterf*ck.
        The train to Chiang Mai will be infinitely more pleasant! Enjoy!

• Clive says:

  26 Sep26 September 17:48

  I have some orphan hotel points to use;

  Wyndham – 3740
  Melia – 2000
  Radisson – 7683

  Any suggestions?

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