La Pope - La Blog

If you're booking a ski holiday, please think twice before going with Alpine Elements.

A group of us went away with them to Les Arc before Christmas and it wasn't a great experience.
 
The apartment was dirty (there were condom wrappers and dirty underwear shoved down the back of one of the beds - ewww!), the poor girls employed by Alpine Elements to do the catering were so inexperienced and underprepared that they didn't even know how to make coffee or porridge, they served up raw chicken for dinner and a Thai fish curry that was so gross it honestly defies description. The apartment was also missing some of the facilities (like a CD player and DVD player) that were advertised on the Alpine Elements website.

There was a load of other stuff too, but the main problem was how Alpine Elements have handled things and that's why I'm blogging about it. I don't enjoy being critical, but we feel like we've been treated badly by them.  We phoned and then wrote a letter to complain (after being told by Alpine Elements that their customer services team didn't like to talk to people on the phone!). It took over two months to get a response. In their letter, Alpine Elements fobbed us off, implying that although they took our complaints seriously, the bad food was a matter of taste and that the other problems were just down to it being the beginning of the ski season.

To add insult to injury, Alpine Elements offered us £50 per person discount off our next booking with them. Why on earth would we want to go on holiday with Alpine Elements again after the experience we had? To me it seems like it's their way of saying they don't care much about what we think - if they really valued us as customers they'd have responded quickly, offered us a decent refund, rather than offering £50 that's useless to us because we'll never book with them again.

I'm sure not everyone who travels with Alpine Elements has a bad time, but I don't think they show much respect for their customers - and I'm not alone, Google them and this forum about Alpine Elements is the third result - I just wish I'd seen it before we booked! Steer clear.