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Tours badly booked
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I have just returned home from a vacation to Costa Rica organized by a Costa Rican Vacation travel consultants. Overall the vacation was satisfactory. I was impressed with the efficient and friendly pick-up and drop off for our travel between locations and tours. I agree with the review below, that this service is very pricey, though. There was a mix-up at our second hotel, but after I made several calls to client services, they did resolve the issue (note that it took several calls back and forth with them). There is one issue that I was very unsatisfied with. We had two tours booked in Tamarindo - a diving tour and a snorkeling tour. Before we left, I had some questions for our travel consultant (Aidan Mullan) about the length and destination of these tours, but I did not receive a response from him. So when we went on the diving tour, I spoke to the tour operators and found out that the snorkeling tour was the same boat and went to the same location as the diving tour (they include both divers and snorkelers on the boat together) - this was very disappointing as we would basically be repeating the same tour twice (and paying twice!). I called client services when we returned from the diving tour, but they said that 24 hours was not enough notice to cancel or rebook a snorkeling tour to a different destination. I am very dissatisfied that the travel consultant did a poor job of booking these tours - there should have been another snorkeling tour organized to a different destination. Travel consultants need to be more diligent in booking a variety of tours and not just booking the same tour twice for their convenience.
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Business's response - on 11/28/2012
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Dawna,
We agree with you that we made a mistake here and that the 2 tours were to the same location. It's important we admit to our mistake but also take responsibility for them. In your case we refunded some of the tour amount to you and have retrained the whole sales team on Guanacaste Tours as well as entered into our sales notes so that this does not happen to any client again.
Thank you for taking the time to write this review and give us an opportunity to correct our error. We hope that you are happy with the resolution and that you will travel with us again to Costa Rica, Panama or Nicaragua.
--*Reply from Dawna*--
Hello Richard,
I appreciate your follow-up and taking responsibility for this mix-up. Yes the $100 Amazon gift card was appreciated and I feel that it was adequate compensation for loss of the tour. I also wanted to mention that the travel consultant erred when they booked our 2nd accomodation - we were able to resolve this over the phone eventually and they moved us to another room; however it took several calls to do this and again, the travel consultant should have taken greater care to ensure that they booked us into accomodation with 2 bedrooms for ourselves and our teenage kids, not a tiny loft with two cots overlooking a bedroom below. I only mention this so that this issue is also addressed in terms of Sales Team education.
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