Travel-Rants Apology to DialAFlight. Travel-Rants offers an unreserved apology to DialAFlight in respect of a post published on this website during the past several months.
DialAFlight contacted us on several occasions pointing out that they believed this particular post (they were not objecting to any of the other handful of posts about them on Travel-Rants) was made by a competitor who had posted precisely the same post on any number of other websites.
Regrettably, Travel-Rants failed to make its normal range of enquiries in such situations. Had it done so, as it now has, it would have concluded that, whether the poster was indeed a competitor, or merely a misguided consumer, the commercial insinuations they were making against Dial a Flight went some way beyond reasonable ‘fair comment’, and DialAFlight had every right to feel they had been unfairly treated.
Just as importantly, when we finally undertook an investigation into the facts, we found that, tellingly, there was an absence of any other consumer comments on the Internet backing up the assertions of this one poster. Whenever there is a real consumer issue at stake, it is almost invariably the case that one post on the subject breeds a multitude, and that certainly failed to materialise in this case.
Indeed, our review demonstrated that DialAFlight, though of course having its own typical fair share of negative consumer comment on the Internet as almost every company of any size (DialAFlight is one of the largest travel companies in the UK), also has an unusually high degree of positive consumer comment and indeed praise, including on this very website. The breadth and depth of this positive opinion around the web was enough to suggest to us that such comments were made by bona fide consumers.
On this basis, we are very sorry that we allowed serious, and we now believe unfounded, allegations against DialAFlight to remain published on this site for so long. That is not what Travel-Rants is about, and we very much regret that DialAFlight has suffered as a result of this neglect.
Unfortunately, Travel-Rants neglected this issue for so long that DialAFlight felt compelled to launch a libel suit against us in the High Court, claiming the removal of the post and considerable damages. Since Travel-Rants has belatedly communicated with DialAFlight admitting its mistake and offering this apology.
DialAFlight have shown themselves magnanimous by waiving their legitimate and substantial entitlement to compensation; on the basis that they had no wish to unnecessarily penalise a website whose merits, as an enabler of fair consumer comment and critique, they generally recognise… as they have demonstrated by focussing only on the one offending post.
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