JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: We’ve all had a Fawlty Towers holiday from hell, but majority of us won’t go to war to get our money back…

We have all been there. In the hotel corridor with our cases in tow, key card in hand, thrilling to the splendour which may lie beyond the door we are about to push open.

We have done our due diligence: read the reviews, perused the online photographs, checked and double checked the facilities on offer and warmed to those little extras – the stuff that goes beyond mere box-ticking and takes us, purring with gratification, into the realm of luxury.

Such as that roaring fire in the lounge of the hotel in Frigiliana, southern Spain, we booked into three winters ago – in front of which, as surely as God was in Govan, we’d repairing nightly for after dinner drinks.

And we have all been on the other side of the hotel room door seconds later as the thrill gives way first to anxiety, then indignation.

‘Sea view? You’d need to stand on a chair to see out of the window – and, frankly, this excuse for one doesn’t look like it could bear my weight.’ (Les Sables D’Olonne, France, 2024)

‘Why is there sticky tape holding the bath taps together? (Same place)

‘Is that a hole in the ceiling? Have they really tried to fill it using scrunched up newspapers? And what are those stains on the cushions? Here, turn them over so we don’t have to look at them. Scratch that, the stains on the other side are even worse. (Perpignan, France, 2024)

I could go on, and will in a bit, but you should know now there is no denouement in my tales of holiday misadventure. In common with most of us, I suck it up, put it down to experience and resolve that the due diligence will be even more thorough next time.

Jane and Damen Bennion outside Central London County Court after a dispute with Club Med

Next time arrives and I find my diligence has again failed to meet the required standard. Like a fool, I have fallen once more for those ecstatic five star reviews and images of to-die-for opulence.

I’m thinking of images much like the ones lawyer Damen Bennion and his accountant wife Jane alighted on before deciding to splurge £6,670 on a week’s stay at the Club Met Opio on the Côte D’Azur with their two sons.

There are 4,150 reviews on Tripadvisor and the resort emerges from this mass of scrutiny as ‘excellent’.

The website promised that ‘fragrant lavender, the song of cicadas and the taste of tapenade’ would take them to ‘the heart of Provence’.

More accurately, the ‘smelly’ room, ‘awful’ dinner, mould-encrusted walls in their hotel suite and stale croissants at breakfast took them to the law courts where, this week, they secured their denouement – £3,945 in damages.

True, this still leaves a £2,725 hole in their finances after a week which left them feeling miserable. But they stood up for themselves when most of us would likely have lain down, muttering only to ourselves about the brazen contempt for paying guests and the injustice of it all.

A stale croissant in the south of France? The place teems with boulangeries offering the crispiest, most heavenly examples of this nationwide breakfast staple. And yet several French hotels I’ve stayed in clearly buy them in packets from a cash and carry.

Mould on the walls? Isn’t the idea that guests are paying for luxury – as opposed to squalor they wouldn’t dream of countenancing in their own homes?

The ‘gourmet’ food was so ‘awful’ at the all-inclusive resort that the couple paid to dine elsewhere after the first night – and all-inclusive, it turned out, excluded the fee for parking their car.

‘We told our children on the first night that daddy would get things sorted, but it wasn’t sorted,’ Mr Bennion told the Central London Country Court.

Perhaps it was this promise to the kids and what it would tell them about their father if he didn’t take things further that spurred him into action when he got home. Dads are supposed to be problem solvers. If dads don’t step up to the plate when, on top of everything else, the croissants are stale, children notice.

And yet the standard reaction to such disappointments for the overwhelming majority of us is to shrug and say, ‘well, we shouldn’t let it spoil our holiday’. We accept appalling standards in much the same way we accept a losing lottery ticket. ‘Unlucky,’ we say when, given the sums we are handing over, luck should not come into it.

My partner and I spent weeks last summer planning our fortnight’s road trip in France, taking in multiple hotel and Airbnb stops from Rouen in the north to Juan-Les-Pins in the south. We went well over our £4,000 budget, telling ourselves we were worth it, and stop by stop, learned what proprietors of said hotels and Airbnbs reckoned we were worth.

A dingy attic room in Les Sables D’Olonne; a shoebox in Bordeaux whose bathroom was a plastic cubicle; the Airbnb in Perpignan with filthy cushions, bathroom ceiling on the verge of collapse and kitchen cupboards sticky with congealed food.

We spent much of our time in these places writing the Tripadvisor reviews in our heads and taking photographic evidence, lest the proprietor should try to argue.

In Avignon, the owner of the property we were staying in never showed up, and instead sent intermittent emails with incomplete instructions on how to get in.

It turned out I was supposed to put my car in the garage, but thus far we didn’t even have access to the house, situated on one of the narrowest streets in town.

Horns honked, stress levels rose and when we did finally get that garage door open, I put a dent in the side of my car trying to squeeze it inside. £590, the car body shop later told me.

I was the picture of misery all evening.

And yet, should you wish to avail yourselves of the full details of these lodgings to avoid in our stinging online reviews, I’m afraid you can’t.

We didn’t write them.

Well, you know how it is. You roll back home in your battered car, do the unpacking and cheer to the fact that you are once again in the bosom of your own living standards. You put your feet up, switch the telly on and let the past dissipate.

Same thing when we came home from Frigiliana in 2021, never once having enjoyed after dinner drinks by that roaring open fire of which the blurb spoke so highly.

They refused to light it. The lounge was freezing.

We asked them directly. Will you prepare the open fire we have read so much about, that we may linger here awhile with our bottle of Rioja? A rueful face: ‘No señor.’

We turned on our heels, went back to our room defeated and took that no further either.

And, in doing nothing, we become enablers for those who treat our holiday savings with disdain. We tell them it’s fine, that we’re not ones to complain. So be our guests, continue about your grubby, indolent business.

The Bennions remembered who were supposed to be the guests in this arrangement. I salute them and hope, in future, to stay angry long enough to emulate them.

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