For our Retirement trip, we chose a local Travel Agent. It was a big trip and we thought it would be helpful. Spoiler: It. Was. Not.
We don’t want to write a review, but I want to share some points.
- Even though are all in Denver, our first meeting was virtual. They all were. Weird, but whatever.
- Our first meeting was to “determine if we qualify” for her services. She already knew this was a trip to Australia, so we were going to meet any spending minimum she had. The wording was just snobby and judgy.
- She “doesn’t like” to book airfare. Yeah, there are reasons, but she’s a damn Travel Agent.
- She got a big commission for booking our cruise. And now, if we book again, they automatically give her a commission again. I don’t know if we’ll ever take another cruise on that brand (cruises don’t let you see much of each port, dates and destinations might not align, etc.) but we’ll have to argue to have her commission removed.
- All documentation she sent was confusing. Everything was in paragraph form instead of bullet lists. Documents were .pdfs instead of something easy to copy/paste into your own format. Dates, confirmation numbers, addresses, etc.—you know, the stuff you actually need—was not separate and clear. Her style was inconsistent, making every day of the trip a new “reading” adventure. We are organized and keep a spreadsheet of essential travel information. There are also great apps to do this for you (Wanderlog). We ended up ditching her expensive books she made us. Oh, but we “needed” other apps for the trip; Axis (?) that TAs promote was useless. (The cruise app was fine.)
- LA: we needed the airport, the nearby cruise port, and Disneyland. Our hotel was nice, but it was in Santa Monica*, far away from all of those things. Our one excursion in LA was terrible. Our morning driver for Disney was late and didn’t communicate, so we ended up taking a $160 cab ride. We got a refund for their blunder, but why were we staying all the way across LA from what we wanted to do? Are there no hotels between the air/cruise ports area and Disney? And then, when we were ready to leave Disney, we had to wait a couple of hours for the other scheduled driver. I doubt the car service she booked was cheaper than the cab or a rideshare (we wouldn’t know, more on that in a bit)…and it came with none of the conveniences of those options.
*The hotel was nice, but we paid for “a beach view”. We aren’t beach people; she is. - Cruise: The line/ship was great. She had no part in that. He found it for us and our whole trip keyed off of those dates. We let her book it despite doing no work. (Early in the cruise, we attended a reception for people who used that same Travel Agent brand; it was weird.)
- Hawaii: (Not her fault, but relevant. Our first excursion was awful. Thinking it was a fluke, we did another bad one.) Later in the cruise, we sat down and eliminated a couple of the ones we had planned from the ship, most of the ones she had picked out for NZ, and a couple she had picked out for Australia. Turns out, the excursions she picked are listed on Viator. She even copy/pasted their descriptions into those damn books she made for us. This proved how little work she did for us.
- New Zealand: For a couple of our hotels, she got our names wrong on the reservations. That caused all kinds of headaches. From Queensland, the drive to Milford Sound (a fjord, not a sound) is quite long. The tour is a 12-hour day. He really wanted to do it, so it’s one of the ones we kept. But she booked it for the day before we had a 4.5-hour drive. So, a few days out, we asked to move it to another day. She “couldn’t find one” for that new date. It took him about 30 seconds on his phone to find one. Now, to be fair, she booked some kind of glass roof van and we ended up in the giant bus from hell*. But, that van wasn’t going to have a bathroom, either.
[* The bus driver was awfully rude, never shut up, and even told us not to talk to each other. Our new friends happened to be on this same tour and we couldn’t talk to them. The tour company wouldn’t let us use the on-board bathrooms (they planned very short stops at parks and businesses instead). The “2-hour boat ride” included the time to load up and out, so it was really only about 90 minutes out and the same route back. Twelve hours for about 45 minutes of new stuff is a very long day.] - Australia: She fought us on not wanting to climb the Sydney Harbour bridge, the tallest steel-arch bridge in the world (134m/440’); we had to decline booking that excursion three times. Then, there was historic flooding. Hamilton Island was a complete deluge, one highway and another bridge were washed out from there to Cairns. We needed to cancel that leg of our trip. Of the approximately 469 companies involved in this trip, none could help us; not her, not her “team” “on the ground” in Australia, not the travel insurance. (One agent even told us to take the 9-hour drive around the washed out bridge, in the storm, in a foreign country, on what might be dirt roads because they are not on the coast.) After getting no help from any of the 469 companies, he spent a whole day calling to cancel/rebook everything: our ferry back to the mainland, our rental car, our hotels, our flight from the north back to Sydney. He also booked us a flight from Hamilton Island to Sydney where we’d re-group, hang out for a few days, and then resume our itinerary. Everything beyond 48 hours from his calls was easily cancelled. But five of those things were being cancelled/booked within that window and wouldn’t allow refunds despite the historic flooding. After we were safe in Sydney, we emailed our TA several times asking for the prices of each of those items so we could file a claim with the travel insurance. Every time, she told us we couldn’t get refunds on stuff we canceled. She didn’t remotely understand that these were within the 48-hour window and insurance was the only way to get that money back. We finally made it work and got a refund, but we’re still not sure it’s complete (the amount was awfully low for all of that). But we can’t verify if it was correct or not because she could/would not provide us with line items for anything.
- Fiji: A few weeks (months?) before we left, we were told that the resort she booked would be under construction. She helped us find a new resort: It. Was. Family. Fuckin’. Friendly. …to the point of it having a Kids’ Club.
- San Francisco: the one part of the trip that she didn’t mess up.
So, she is fired. We didn’t thank her at all. We declined to meet with her to tell her about our trip; instead, he wrote her a very short “we’re home / Amtrak sucked” email. We didn’t leave a review. We won’t refer her.
