Planning trips is what I do when I’m not on a trip. Late last year, knowing we were to be in France on a cycling trip with a dozen friends – and that’s a story for another day – we decide to follow this with a canal boat trip. My brother Steven and his wife Diana are keen to join us. I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I spend on the internet to make this happen, only that it’s fortunate I don’t charge by the hour. If I did we could probably buy the boat outright.
We choose a company called Locaboat, and settle on a river south of Bordeaux. Considerable discussion on which boat ensues; the h-g, being the salty old dog he is, will be the unchallenged Captain and has some requirements; Diana needs an extra cabin for her bags; we need a decent galley – that’s a kitchen to you landlubbers, and various other requirements without which civilisation may collapse.
We choose the boat. We book dates. We pay the deposit – €1400 of a total €4,000 since you ask. We picture ourselves gliding through the French countryside, lazily sipping Rosé and waving baguettes at passing cyclists and pedestrians, stopping only to open and close locks to facilitate progress.
Then an email arrives. The boat we’d booked now isn’t available. We could change location, or change boat. It took so long to agree on the boat, we’re not changing that. Not ideal, but these things happen. So, ok, north of Lyon looks good. We change rivers. We rearrange our plans. We tell ourselves that flexibility is part of the travel experience.
A couple of weeks later the second email arrives. We would no longer be departing from where we had been told we were departing. Instead, we needed to start from further north, from Dompierre-sur-Loire. By now we’re in France on our cycle trip, Steven and Diana are on a riverboat somewhere on the Danube. More rearranging. More looking at train timetables. More opportunities to discover obscure French railway stations we never previously consider visiting.
Oh, another email. Riverly has bought out Locaboat, but don’t worry, nothing will change. This proves to be one of the funnier statements in the entire correspondence.
In late May we pay the balance for our mid June departure. We are committed, Financially, emotionally, and perhaps requiring psychological evaluation.
Another email. Forget Dompierre-sur-Loire. We’re now leaving from Gannay. At this point, the holiday is beginning to resemble a shell game. Every time we think we know where our boat is, somebody moves it. Still, we persevere, despite imminent meltdowns and rumblings of discontent. More train timetables, more logistics.
Another email. We now need to leave from Corbigny, even further north, and make a one-way trip. The h-g counts 40 odd locks. We’ll be so busy opening and closing lock gates we won’t have time to open the wine, never mind drink it. You know that camel with the broken back? At this point we’re deep into a live-action demonstration of chaos theory. Every change creates new problems. It’s as if all the planning is being slowly dismantled, one email at a time, and replaced with a completely different holiday assembled from whatever spare parts happened to be available that week. If the next email announced that our canal boat is actually a kayak departing from Belgium, none of us would be particularly surprised.
The only thing that remains constant is the growing sense that they don’t know what they’re doing. I send a brief email in response, detailing the changes and expressing a lack of confidence in their ability to deliver, and ask for a full refund. The response is not what I expect.
Hello Mr. (sic) Marshall,
I extend to you our apologies, indeed the chaos of organisation on our part has made this trip way more complicated than it shoud have been. We will be doing a full refund of your rental, I will start the process today, the rest will be in the hands of our accounting department, the money should take at maximum 2 weeks to come.
Travel companies talk about creating memorable experiences. This one succeeds.