Persistence pays off

In some ways you have to admire her tenacity. Faced with a wall of silence from low-cost airline easyJet, Carole Denford did not, as most us would, put it down to experience and give up. Having had her requests for a refund repeatedly ignored, the London-based fashion editor of The Hat Magazine, started sending easyJet fax, after fax, after fax ...

But it was only after she and a friend combined forces to communicate with the company more than 1,000 times demanding a response that she was finally contacted by the airline, which eventually processed a refund.

"Because of my work, I take around 30 flights a year, and things often change at the last moment. Last January I booked two flights to Berlin with easyJet. I had to change one, but because I have an Apple Mac computer, the easyJet website wouldn't let me change it online. In the end, it was easier and cheaper to buy new flights, and then face a battle to get the £160 owed."

Along with countless others, she simply couldn't get through by phone. "At the beginning, I rang twice on the 65p-a-minute number - the second time for about five minutes. Then I went back to the website and found, in the small print, a number that was only 10p a minute. I rang this eight times and was always held in a queue. The longest I waited was about 20 minutes - all the time giving the company money via my phone bill."

By July, she had almost given up and was chatting about the problem with a friend, Tony Peirson, who runs a hat factory in Luton. He said he'd bet the company would deal with it if she sent them 100 faxes. "So I got the main fax number from the headed notepaper (01582 443355) and sent off the faxes demanding it be sorted out.

"When nothing happened, I sent another 100, and still nothing. My friend was so incensed, he started sending them from his work, too. He sent another 300, then a further 200 on the following two days - between us, we sent about 1,100."

A few days later, while in France - and six months after the original request for a refund - she received a phone call from the company. Unable to talk at the time, she asked for a number so she could call back when she returned to the UK. "I did phone when I got back. Although the manager seemed horrified when he found out that I was just a peasant from the general public, he did, at least, sort it out, and I now have the credit note."