Matt.GC
TS Member
So Hilton got back to me fairly quickly apologising as I decided to deal with that separately. Alton Towers assured me that they had dealt with that side of things, but only one room had been refunded so, after a few days of not hearing from Merlin, I contacted Hilton direct. They immediately investigated, found that their PDQ machine had not processed one of the refunds as it looked like a duplicate, and processed the other one. They contacted a few days later to ensure it had gone back on the card with another apology. Although it wasn't easy to get hold of them in the first place, Hilton were quick and attentive once contact was established so credit to them.
Other than an auto generated case reference number, I didn't hear from Merlin at all, but did eventually hear back from Alton Towers. I assume that they merged the cases (I had a separate reference with each) and the resort took responsibility for handling it. This took around a week to hear from anyone initially, but I assumed they were busy, not only due to the time of year (this was just before Fireworks) but after what the lady said to me at the ticket office on the second day, I imagine they had a lot of these cases to deal with. To be fair, the response was quite personable, you could tell that each point I made was read in full and understood if you see what I mean? They agreed it should not have happened, and understood that it pretty much ruined much of our trip.
Long wait again once I provided a couple of small details I had been asked for, but a couple of weeks ago I heard back. They've offered 4 return tickets (pretty standard I would have thought) and 4 Gold Fastracks on a day of our choice for next season. I was a little disappointed at first, but then when I thought about it, the amount of product I've been offered does come to more than the initial price of our total trip. I'm likely to go again anyway at some point (although if they hadn't dealt with it, I don't think I would have gone back next season at all) so I do have use for what they've offered. If second day free returns next year, I could potentially find a decent overnight price and have 2 days away just for the price of that. Plus with the gold FT, I wouldn't be tied to just off peak days.