We booked through Jagadish Travels, Bangalore for a trip to Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia for 11 nights 12 days. Before booking we compared with MakeMyTrip, Kesari, SOTC and Raj found Jagadish to be most cost effective for the similar kind of days and plans, so booked with them.
Positives:
They are Bangalore based and typically run 1 trip a month, dates are not final and if you have no. and book early you can negotiate on the dates too. I do not this you can do this with any of the big organizers. Also all trips originates from Bangalore, so you will not have to travel to Delhi, Mumbai or Chennai, from where most of the trips originates from.
Their trip plan is as good as any other tour operators but the cost is little less than the others, the hotels booked were good(3 star, clean and safe), except the one booked in Singapore, who was supposed to be demolished in 3 months and thus the maintenance was very poor. After checking in we had to complain and finally they were able to get it changed the next day. But hotels in Bangkok, Patayya, KL and Genting was good.
The plan is quite comprehensive and includes all visa charges, air fare, airport fees, all meals(breakfast, lunch and dinner), all accomodation and all travels. When you compare different tour operators pricing pay special attention to these as most of the low fares in the advertisements will not include some of these.
We found the local guide in Malaysia very helpful and could speak good english.
Negetives:
- Local guide in Thailand was ok and her english was average but the guide in
Singapore was pathetic and her english was bad.
Air travel is by Air Lanka, which is ok but not as good as Thai or Singapore Airlines. The planes are old though food/service is good. Stop over in Colombo is pain as you lose a day while coming back.
Hotel in Singapore was pathetic and we had to stay these for 1 night before it was changed.
I found the tour manager who traveled with us from Bangalore was quite useless and he fought
with everyone in the group because of some reason or other. The guides in
Thailand and Singapore were very poor in English and you should double check with them what they are saying or what they are trying to say. And our tour manager was translating in Kannada which was
not very helpful for us.
- Since this operator is Bangalore based they will have lot of local people and
thus would take you to south indian restaurants also for dinner/lunch, not a big
issue unless you are particular about north indian food. Also the indian
restaurants they picked in Thailand were quite bad in terms of food quality and taste.
- Visa service by them was not very professional as they goofed up for people whose passport was not issue in Bangalore/Chennai. If your passport is not issued from these 2 places, you need to be careful as your Singapore visa application will go to
Delhi or Mumbai and they will ask for extra papers which these people will not
have much idea about(because they haven’t dealt with such cases before) and it can cause delay in visa or even denial of visa.
- As part of City Tour they will take you to shops which are over priced and which provide good commissions to them and they will encourage you to buy from there. They will also keep you there for 1-2 hours so that you end up buying something. This is really irritating, 2 things you should notice there, 1. you will not find any local people in these shops, reason obvious. 2. You will never find these shops being recommended by any tour guides, like lonely planet or virtualtourist or even the government travel home pages.