Exactly Tiggerific, also, after a 14 hour day with no crew food it's not very nice to be told that the hotel you are nightstopping in has no rooms. Then try + phone crewing who don't pick the phone up for 45 minutes to then get told you are in a different hotel. I must've left my crystal ball at check in. Then being assured the next day that you are booked into a crew hotel for that night, get back to the hotel + surprise surprise - no room booked. The hotel asks to take credit card details so we can get into our rooms - do I look that stupid? The hotel rings Flybe - no answer - the receptionist makes a joke that Flybe have caller id + probably know who it who is calling so she witholds the number. Lo + behold the Flybe phone is answered within 2 rings. Coincidence maybe??? I think not.
I'm not going to intentionally disagree but has it occured to you that whilst you are working your arses off at the moment, so are the likes of Operations and Crewing who are dealing with double the number of crew, but without double the number of Crewing/Ops staff!
With all respect to the crewing and hotac staff at EXT, who I'm sure have their work cut out, we ex-Ba CON crew rarely experienced such problems in our past life and when they did occasionally arise, it would take one phone call (answered promtly may I add) and it was sorted within a matter of minutes. As for the claim that Flybe crewing are dealing with twice the amount of crew I recall there was only one guy employed on hotac (as well as other duties) who worked standard office hours whom i believe had fantastic relationships with both crew and the hotels. In fact the only time there was major problems, it usually stemmed back to the fact he was actually out of the country on leave and there was no cover!
Here at Flybe there may be slightly more crew however there are actually in fact 4 hotac controllers as well as a hotac superviser who cover the operation for 12 hours everyday including weekends and there are LESS nightstops than before! common sense says there is something wrong somewhere!!