The Torturous Trip to Tenerife

My trip to Tenerife, Canary Islands, should have been one of relaxing and fun in the sun, but even before we left, the trip was headed into a storm that had nothing to do with the weather. It all started because my husband and I decided to book a trip through a travel agent for the first time ever. We were short on time and the agent was offering a great deal.

I went to the agent and got information about all the travel packages and my husband and I discussed our options before choosing a resort in Los Cristianos. The next day, I returned to the agent to book our trip and spent four hours sitting there waiting through computer problems and a perpetual telephone hold that played the chorus of one song repeatedly the whole time. In the end, however, the trip was booked and I was told that my tickets would arrive the following week.

Two weeks later, we were approaching take off time and still no tickets, so I returned to the agent. It turns out that they hadn't completed our reservations due to the technical difficulties they had that day. But we "were on the list to be notified." Our flight was in three days. However, four hours later (again) I left the agent, tickets in hand, and we prepared for our flight to the Canary Islands.

Due to the lack of public transportation as a whole, we chose to pre-book a taxi to and from the airport. When we were dropped off in front of our hotel, we were given instructions on setting up the return trip (must call no less than 24 hours before flight).

Thus at our hotel, we checked in. Now in the information from which we chose this hotel, the amenities included pool, half board, full size bed, mini fridge, and air conditioning. This room...had no air conditioning. It was over 90 degrees, really high humidity and very poor air circulation in the room. It didn't even have a fan. When we got home, we figured out that they had booked the wrong resort the second time, which had less amenities and was more expensive.

We asked the desk clerk about a fan for the room and found out that they had some rotary fans that we could rent for €15 (approximately $22.50) a day. We toughed it out the first night and decided to buy a fan (for the same price) instead.

While we were out looking at fans and otherwise enjoying the day, the maids cleaned our room, thoroughly. They made the bed, washed the bathroom, picked up and threw out the trash...and our plane tickets. We didn't notice the plane tickets were missing until we tried to get the flight time for the taxi service. By then, the front desk clerk suddenly had a case of amnesia when it came to the English language.

So, I used my cell phone to contact the travel agent back in England (the agency is German and they didn't have any English speaking representatives outside of England). I was on hold with them for 30 minutes before she told me that she would call me back. That was good, since it was a pre-paid phone and I didn't know how many minutes remained on it or where in Spain I could buy more minutes for a Virgin phone plan.

She called me back with the reservation number for our flight, but by then it was 20 hours before our flight time. I called the taxi service hoping they would understand and was told that they would be there to pick us up despite the mix-up.

Unfortunately, that didn't end the fiasco. The next day, my husband and I waited an hour past our pick up time for the taxi before calling them. We then found out that the person from the day before hadn't ever put us on the list, but if we waited another 45 minutes (giving us all of 20 minutes to get to the airport and check in), they would pick us up. We canceled and called a regular cab to take us to the airport.

All told, the trip cost us €350.00 more than it should have and about €500.00 more than if we had booked it ourselves. Oh well, live and learn, I guess.