Post by Oz-T on Jul 1, 2018 1:42:18 GMT
I'd heard the stories over many years, but the prospect of a tour not proceeding hadn't really hit me until we became victims too. I've already mentioned this elsewhere here, but these were the circumstances:
Last September, we booked and paid for two Trafalgar tours: Best of Turkey and Best of Greece with 3 day Aegean. We chose Trafalgar due to satisfaction with past trips and the pairing worked well, with only one day between the two tours. The tours did not have guaranteed departures, which didn't surprise me, considering that I was booking nine months ahead. But this had never been a problem with past tours to Europe because they occurred in the popular May-June, early summer. To obtain cheap airfares, our travel agent got us great deals, albeit fares that were fixed and unable to be changed to different dates. This wasn't considered important because it had always worked, and I only had a limited window of travel times between busy times at work.
So we were pretty relaxed about all this and settled back into months of our usual routines. Until eight weeks before departure when our travel agent called to inform us that Trafalgar had cancelled Best of Turkey outright. The reason was presumably insufficient numbers but you never really get an idea of what triggers this. Did the numbers never get anywhere near a sensible tour group size? Or was Trafalgar just playing games by combining three consecutive tours into two to maximise their profits?
The solution put forth was for us to simply join the next Turkey tour which was departing two days later. That doesn't seem all that bad, but it did present problems to us. With inflexible flight times (wholly our responsibility) that would have meant arriving in Istanbul 3.5 days before the tour started - and an extra $400 in hotel costs. But worse still, instead of having a day between the two tours, they overlapped by one day. This meant that we would have to decide whether we would miss either the last day of the first tour or the first day of the next. In doing so we would miss the farewell dinner in Istanbul, or the city tour of Athens, both of which occurred on that overlap day. And worse, we were paying for two hotels on that night; Istanbul and Athens.
If that wasn't bad enough, there were absolutely no efforts by Trafalgar to address the problem. They and the travel agent kept harping on about departures not being guaranteed, which of course is the risk we take. My gripe was that the second tour wasn't with a competitor: Trafalgar had placed us on two overlapped tours and was very aware of this, yet they did not make a single attempt to contact me or my travel agent to discuss how to reduce the mess or to discuss compensation. The TA informed me that Trafalgar did have a standard $100 per person compensation policy but that was a joke when you consider that they had cut short one entire day of touring, a meal, a hotel and had caused us to buy two extra days of hotels at the start.
Travel insurance didn't cover this type of incident, even though it was a top-level comprehensive policy. So I started to explore ways that the Turkey tour could be resurrected. The TA suggested that we could leave the tour one day early from Ankara, flying to Istanbul and then onto Athens. That would cost $520 but we would still miss the farewell dinner and were still doubling up on hotels we had paid for. I began to explore the idea of choosing another tour company and our TA wasn't keen. We had purchased Trafalgar's 'Gold Seal' protection and among other things, this provides customers with a refund if they cancel a tour for any reason. The TA agreed this was possible but we wouldn't get a refund of the $200 Gold Seal cost. I reminded her that it was Trafalgar who cancelled the tour and that we should not be compelled to pay for a type of Trafalgar insurance on a tour Trafalgar itself cancelled. I got nowhere with this and irate enough to actively search for an alternative. Meanwhile, my TA and Trafalgar worked on a compensation deal, based on my summary of out-of-pocket costs. They did a better job on this than they said they'd done to anyone, due to my past purchases of Trafalgar trips, but it fell well short of my costs.
My search of alternatives led me to Tempo Holidays here in Australia. They are not a tour company; they merely package tours from worldwide tour businesses. They do this via travel agents or directly to retail customers. In effect, they outsource the tours to local businesses, and claim that they only deal with reputable tour companies. A quick browse on the internet revealed overwhelmingly positive feedback for their Turkey provider, Neon Tours. I called them to ask, with only seven weeks prior to departure, whether they had seats and guaranteed departures. Next day, after confirming with Neon's office in Istanbul, the news was good: Yes, the trip was proceeding, and we could join it. Even more astonishing was that the tour had only five people on it at this stage. So I instructed my TA to not accept Trafalgar's replacement tour and to proceed with Tempo/Neon's "Glories of Turkey". That tour was 15 days compared to Trafalgar's 14, it went to the same places, provided more included dinners and was cheaper. It started with a 'meet & greet' on the evening of the day we flew into Istanbul, so we lost our usual 'padding' but that seemed a tiny risk. After a few weeks, our refund came through from Trafalgar.
So now we're back from this trip and I'll post a travel tale of both the Neon Turkey and Trafalgar Greece tours. But I can make the clear observation that Neon Tours provided a service that was virtually identical to Trafalgar's, if not better. It was cheaper and with more inclusions, and our guide was perfect. The small tour group of seven (later five because two people had only paid for a half-tour and left after a few days) was far better than the crowded coaches of 40+ people that Trafalgar usually has. It was like having our personal tour guide and there was a little flexibility as it went.
We have learned a few lessons from this experience:
1. Don't assume that tours will become guaranteed departure even if they're at popular times. Turkey is suffering a serious drop in tourism due to security issues with Syria and that impact is being felt by all tour companies.
2. Don't book too early. We've traditionally booked our June European holidays eight or nine months early to take advantage of discounted airfares. But I found that the prices were the same just a few weeks before departure. So despite a tendency to get everything organised early, I won't be committing so early to future trips. This could be a huge problem for Trafalgar and others if everybody does this: imagine most people delaying booking a tour until they see a green tick? Guaranteed departures can only happen if the tour company gets people committing instead of waiting for each other to go first. Trafalgar has caused me to hold back in future and that's a terrible signal that can disrupt their business if plenty of others follow suit.
3. I will consider using a different travel agent in future. She was friendly and tried her best but too many young people get jobs there these days and they sometimes lack the experience to adequately deal with things when something goes wrong. I need to be more involved than I should.
4. Consider flexible airfares. Usually the lowest price works well and we only use high quality airlines. But it's worth having an ability to slightly alter flights if circumstances change.
5. There are other good tour operators who provide an equal or better service than Trafalgar. I was extremely disappointed with the way Trafalgar simply dumped the problem onto its customers and placed all the burden of recovering the situation with us. Cancelling a tour just eight weeks before departure is far too late. Deliberately overlapping two paid tours and walking away without the slightest feeling of responsibility or the need to help fix it was appalling behaviour and I will be making a formal complaint about it.
We had a fantastic tour with Neon and I thoroughly recommend them for anybody wishing to travel to see Turkey. And I am now a convert to Tempo Holidays and will definitely see what tours they offer when I'm looking at our next tour.
Last September, we booked and paid for two Trafalgar tours: Best of Turkey and Best of Greece with 3 day Aegean. We chose Trafalgar due to satisfaction with past trips and the pairing worked well, with only one day between the two tours. The tours did not have guaranteed departures, which didn't surprise me, considering that I was booking nine months ahead. But this had never been a problem with past tours to Europe because they occurred in the popular May-June, early summer. To obtain cheap airfares, our travel agent got us great deals, albeit fares that were fixed and unable to be changed to different dates. This wasn't considered important because it had always worked, and I only had a limited window of travel times between busy times at work.
So we were pretty relaxed about all this and settled back into months of our usual routines. Until eight weeks before departure when our travel agent called to inform us that Trafalgar had cancelled Best of Turkey outright. The reason was presumably insufficient numbers but you never really get an idea of what triggers this. Did the numbers never get anywhere near a sensible tour group size? Or was Trafalgar just playing games by combining three consecutive tours into two to maximise their profits?
The solution put forth was for us to simply join the next Turkey tour which was departing two days later. That doesn't seem all that bad, but it did present problems to us. With inflexible flight times (wholly our responsibility) that would have meant arriving in Istanbul 3.5 days before the tour started - and an extra $400 in hotel costs. But worse still, instead of having a day between the two tours, they overlapped by one day. This meant that we would have to decide whether we would miss either the last day of the first tour or the first day of the next. In doing so we would miss the farewell dinner in Istanbul, or the city tour of Athens, both of which occurred on that overlap day. And worse, we were paying for two hotels on that night; Istanbul and Athens.
If that wasn't bad enough, there were absolutely no efforts by Trafalgar to address the problem. They and the travel agent kept harping on about departures not being guaranteed, which of course is the risk we take. My gripe was that the second tour wasn't with a competitor: Trafalgar had placed us on two overlapped tours and was very aware of this, yet they did not make a single attempt to contact me or my travel agent to discuss how to reduce the mess or to discuss compensation. The TA informed me that Trafalgar did have a standard $100 per person compensation policy but that was a joke when you consider that they had cut short one entire day of touring, a meal, a hotel and had caused us to buy two extra days of hotels at the start.
Travel insurance didn't cover this type of incident, even though it was a top-level comprehensive policy. So I started to explore ways that the Turkey tour could be resurrected. The TA suggested that we could leave the tour one day early from Ankara, flying to Istanbul and then onto Athens. That would cost $520 but we would still miss the farewell dinner and were still doubling up on hotels we had paid for. I began to explore the idea of choosing another tour company and our TA wasn't keen. We had purchased Trafalgar's 'Gold Seal' protection and among other things, this provides customers with a refund if they cancel a tour for any reason. The TA agreed this was possible but we wouldn't get a refund of the $200 Gold Seal cost. I reminded her that it was Trafalgar who cancelled the tour and that we should not be compelled to pay for a type of Trafalgar insurance on a tour Trafalgar itself cancelled. I got nowhere with this and irate enough to actively search for an alternative. Meanwhile, my TA and Trafalgar worked on a compensation deal, based on my summary of out-of-pocket costs. They did a better job on this than they said they'd done to anyone, due to my past purchases of Trafalgar trips, but it fell well short of my costs.
My search of alternatives led me to Tempo Holidays here in Australia. They are not a tour company; they merely package tours from worldwide tour businesses. They do this via travel agents or directly to retail customers. In effect, they outsource the tours to local businesses, and claim that they only deal with reputable tour companies. A quick browse on the internet revealed overwhelmingly positive feedback for their Turkey provider, Neon Tours. I called them to ask, with only seven weeks prior to departure, whether they had seats and guaranteed departures. Next day, after confirming with Neon's office in Istanbul, the news was good: Yes, the trip was proceeding, and we could join it. Even more astonishing was that the tour had only five people on it at this stage. So I instructed my TA to not accept Trafalgar's replacement tour and to proceed with Tempo/Neon's "Glories of Turkey". That tour was 15 days compared to Trafalgar's 14, it went to the same places, provided more included dinners and was cheaper. It started with a 'meet & greet' on the evening of the day we flew into Istanbul, so we lost our usual 'padding' but that seemed a tiny risk. After a few weeks, our refund came through from Trafalgar.
So now we're back from this trip and I'll post a travel tale of both the Neon Turkey and Trafalgar Greece tours. But I can make the clear observation that Neon Tours provided a service that was virtually identical to Trafalgar's, if not better. It was cheaper and with more inclusions, and our guide was perfect. The small tour group of seven (later five because two people had only paid for a half-tour and left after a few days) was far better than the crowded coaches of 40+ people that Trafalgar usually has. It was like having our personal tour guide and there was a little flexibility as it went.
We have learned a few lessons from this experience:
1. Don't assume that tours will become guaranteed departure even if they're at popular times. Turkey is suffering a serious drop in tourism due to security issues with Syria and that impact is being felt by all tour companies.
2. Don't book too early. We've traditionally booked our June European holidays eight or nine months early to take advantage of discounted airfares. But I found that the prices were the same just a few weeks before departure. So despite a tendency to get everything organised early, I won't be committing so early to future trips. This could be a huge problem for Trafalgar and others if everybody does this: imagine most people delaying booking a tour until they see a green tick? Guaranteed departures can only happen if the tour company gets people committing instead of waiting for each other to go first. Trafalgar has caused me to hold back in future and that's a terrible signal that can disrupt their business if plenty of others follow suit.
3. I will consider using a different travel agent in future. She was friendly and tried her best but too many young people get jobs there these days and they sometimes lack the experience to adequately deal with things when something goes wrong. I need to be more involved than I should.
4. Consider flexible airfares. Usually the lowest price works well and we only use high quality airlines. But it's worth having an ability to slightly alter flights if circumstances change.
5. There are other good tour operators who provide an equal or better service than Trafalgar. I was extremely disappointed with the way Trafalgar simply dumped the problem onto its customers and placed all the burden of recovering the situation with us. Cancelling a tour just eight weeks before departure is far too late. Deliberately overlapping two paid tours and walking away without the slightest feeling of responsibility or the need to help fix it was appalling behaviour and I will be making a formal complaint about it.
We had a fantastic tour with Neon and I thoroughly recommend them for anybody wishing to travel to see Turkey. And I am now a convert to Tempo Holidays and will definitely see what tours they offer when I'm looking at our next tour.
