RIDICULOUS CUSTOMER SERVICE *0 STARS*

I would have given 0 stars if the platform allowed me to. We recently travelled to Thailand, with flights booked through Travelstart. at the Phi Phi islands, we were stranded due to the tropical storm Pabuk. We had a flight on the 5th of January to Bangkok, but couldn't leave the island due to the storm. I emailed the "urgent" mail box on the 4th of January asking what our options was - no reply. On the morning of the 5th we emailed Travelstart 2 more times with no response (our flight was at 15:00 on the 5th). We phoned both Bankok Airways as well as Etihad airways and they stated that they couldn't change the flights for us as we had to go through our travel agency. With no response received from Travelstart, we booked a flight from Krabi to Bangkok in order to make our hotel reservation and paid R5000 extra to get to Bangkok. Only when we arrived in Bangkok at the hotel did we receive an email from Travelstart stating that they can cancel the earlier flight to Bangkok (which we already missed) and also our flight back to South Africa? on the 10th of January. The refund for 2 persons was R300??? This is absolutely appalling - we paid an extra R280 per person for the cancellation policy when we booked the tickets for an Emergency like this. So to summarize, absolutely NO CUSTOMER SERVICE IN AN EMERGENCY and a RIDICULOUS REFUND OFFER? If you cancelled our flights how were we supposed to get back to South Africa??? To make matters worse we then encountered problems at the Bangkok airport when we checked in to go back to South Africa as the other flight that we missed was unfulfilled and we had to explain for an hour why we missed the flight and how we got to Bangkok?? This whole experience with Travelstart was ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS and we will not recommend them to anyone

Irene Venter **********