Best company to book a tour holiday with

Williewonthe · 22 March 2014 at 9:53AM

Travelbag? My friends and I would not travel with them again EVER.

We booked a tour to S. America via one of their outlets in the South of England.

The itinerary was a mess, I had to rule lines across it to understand what was being done on what day. There were mistakes. The part after Buenos Aires was missing - apart from some shorthand. I asked for the same information as given for up to Bs AS, but it never arrived.

We were frequently on the phone/email asking for information we had been promised by their so-called 'expert' on S. America, who seemed to be (almost) always on holiday. His response was invariably ‘I thought I had sent that’.

His master-stroke was to book us from La Paz to Buenos Aires (there are no direct flights) with a seven hour wait in Lima and an overnight flight arriving in Bs As at, as I remember, about 5 am the following morning. It was me who pointed out that there was another flight that day that involved a wait in Lima of about 90 minutes and that got us into Bs As mid-afternoon. If he had been such an expert on South America he should have known that, instead of sending us ‘backwards’ to Lima and then forwards to Buenos Aires, there was a Bolivian airlines flight to Santa Cruz (Bolivia) with a very convenient connection on to Buenos Aires.

We had a cancelled flight in Peru and, when we got back home, made a formal complaint via Travelbag. This was not handled particularly efficiently but what really annoyed us was that the female contact in Travelbag told me that TACA had offered us overnight accommodation. When I asked her to provide proof of this (as it was a lie), she admitted that they hadn’t, she’d just said it!

The agents on the ground for Peru, Bolivia and Argentina – Condor Travel - were excellent. The rep in Rio could not be contacted when we needed him most.

I’ve heard good things about Trailfinders – but personally I would avoid Travelbag.

Mrs_Soup · 22 March 2014 at 10:29AM

You could try going to a local independant travel agent- tell them exactly what you want and they can then book the various bits of it for you. I have done trips to both Sri Lanka and South Africa where part of it was a tour and part staying in one place in a hotel, arranged by our local agent. Have also been on a Titan tour holiday which was good but you are way too young for them - I was 40 and about the youngest person on the coach.