Even though we had a slightly bad experience the last time we booked a tour to the US through Cox & Kings, we decided to give them another change as this trip was a complete customized tour of Switzerland. The nightmare has already begun.
The initial response was extremely quick and complete ( leaving my wife and I quite surprised). A detailed list of hotels and airline options, along with the various palaces to visit during our stay. After a quick exchange of mails and a few changes in the hotels, the itinerary was finalized and we had given the booking advance. Now this is where it started going bad.....
We paid cash to the representative of CK who had come to our residence to give us details about our trip and handed us a brother too.. With a promise to mail in our receipt for the amount paid, he left. The next day, the asst. manager who was handling our account has called to confirm the advance and said that the receipt will be mailed to us by evening. It has been two weeks since and every time we ask her for the receipt, we hear a different story. So far,
sorry sir, I am little busy with other clients ( c’mon are we clients only until we pay)
I will mail you the receipts today without fail
I handed over the receipt to the rep who collected the cash and he seems to be busy
I have to wait and watch for more such stories.
Ne ways, we overlooked this as we have received confirmations on the air tickets
The best part is that we had specifically asked for two particular hotels, one of which they said didn’t encourage bookings by travel agents (I now understand why) and the other is another story with more twists and turns than our Bollywood masala. First she confirmed verbally that the hotel was booked and that t he vouchers will be mailed soon. We made booking for the one place that do don’t encourage agents and received the confirmation voucher within a day’s time. No mail from CK yet, so we decide to call her gain and also did a bit of research ourselves on the bookings of the other hotel. W also found some discrepancies in the rates quoted (higher than even the rack rates of the hotel) and asked for a cost breakup for the hotel bookings.
This is when we got a shock; she blindly forwarded a mail from one of her colleague (presumably from the booking office or HO) in which it is clearly mentioned that this hotel is full for the requested dates and hence booking has not been made. Furious, we immediately called our account manager and confronted her on this. To this, she responded firstly by putting the blame squarely on us that we delayed in giving the confirmation and upon referring to the mail that we had sent to her over a week ago (at. Which point we also checked on the hotel website and rooms were still available) she immediately changed her stand and asked us to have faith in her and she would definitely confirm this hotel itself as she had just spoken to her colleague over the phone and that he had confirmed that the booking has been made.
Buying her story, we decided to give her the time. Two days later, today, we called her again to check on the status and we got some more bull$#*t, with some ’trust’ and ’faith’ thrown in with ’professional’ and ’corporate’. This time we are really pissed and decided to take things into our own hands and called the hotel directly and the reservations desk confirmed that there is no reservation on our name or the travel agent and that the hotel is fully booked for the requested dates and there is absolutely no possibility of getting a reservation as the said date falls on a Sunday.
We have now finally decided to cut the crap (CK) out and make all the hotel bookings ourselves and now have to begin from scratch and even have to reschedule this trip we have been looking forward to for almost a month now.
Oh! And the icing on the cake is a INR.40, 000 quote for two cab rides between 1) the airport and railway stn and 2) railway station and hotel both of which are less than 2 km each. Sighting that a person has to be engaged for the entire day, car has to be paid for up and down etc etc.. and by the way, the official cab fare is abt CHF 5 ( INR. 300 or so). are they goin to have us air lifted or what?
Besides this, ther are a few more things which I cannot mention on public domain as I would need to use profanity if I were to express my true feelings..
My recommendation to any one with basic knowledge of the Internet and time on their hands; you will be better off making your own reservations and using services of such so called ’professional tour operators’ a sheer waste of time and money. Trust us, you WILL save yourself a lot of disappointment and have can have a peaceful trip.