I along with my wife took the 10 day exotic far east tour with Raj in December, 2007. Raj Travels made a complete mockery of the travel arrangements leading to a lot of discomfort for us.
Travel Issues
As per the itenary, we were supposed to take a direct flight from Mumbai to Bangkok and reach Pattaya before noon, but the actual tickets were booked for a connecting flight via Chennai. We finally reached Pattaya at around 8:30 pm and were taken straight to the Tiffany show without being given a chance to freshen up. We were all tired and most of us did not enjoy the show. Because of this mess created by Raj, as you can see, we almost lost that entire day.
Raj had also made a mess of our flight bookings from Bangkok to KL. Half the group was supposed to take the 7:00 am flight while the other half was supposed to take the 9:00 am flight. I was a part of the latter group. Anyways, we were all made to wake up at 3:00 am in the morning because the tour manager was not willing to have the bus make 2 rounds for the 2 groups of people. As a result we had to sleep for 2 hours at the Bangkok airport, while the people who took the earlier flight had to wait at KL for us to join them.
From KL to Singapore, we were taken on an overnight train in a chair car coach with no running water in the toilets. Because of the chair car, we did not get much sleep at night.
Our return flight from Singapore to Mumbai was again booked via Chennai, with a halt of around 6 hours at Chennai.
Broken Promises
The sales personnel from Raj made the following promises that were broken:
We would not have to wait at the Bangkok airport for people who were supposed to get their visas on arrival. But actually, we had to wait for at least 3 hours for others.
Our bookings in the train from KL to Singapore would be for an AC sleeper coach. As mentioned before, the bookings were actually made for a chair car instead.
Tour Manager
Our tour manager was hopeless. There was no form of hospitality that one would expect from a tour manager. He was just concerned with whatever administration he was supposed to do.
Local tour guides
The Thai tour guide was good and quite chirpy, trying to speak hindi in bits, which fascinated most of us. One thing we noticed during the tour was that the local tour guides would make sure that they get to make money from us. They would arrange for optional tours apart from the itenary, and would charge us handsomely for those tours. In one case, where we felt that the Thai tour guide had charged us too much for an optional tour, we discussed this with our tour manager, but he did not seem to bother. May be, even he was getting a cut. In Malaysia and Singapore, the local tour guides would take us to particular "duty free" shops for shopping, and we were sure that they were earning a good commission out there. I am not against the commission, but because of this, we lost time and actually missed some of the stuff mentioned in the itenary. I found it unfortunate that most people in the tour were so fond of shopping that they did not bother much about this.
Miscellaneous
The food we had during the tour was average. The restaurants in Thailand were far away from the hotel, which usually meant a lot of travel just for going to have meals.
Since I am from Mumbai, I am lucky that I did not suffer from one problem that most others in the tour faced. Most of the people in the tour were from Gujrat, from areas in and around Ahmedabad. They were promised return flight tickets from Ahmedabad to Mumbai as a complimentary offer, but just before the tour started, were told that the tickets could not be arranged, and they could take the Raj National Express if they wished. As a result, some had to book flight tickets to and from Mumbai at the last moment, while others had to come by the Raj National Express.
In a nutshell
We did have a lot of fun during the tour and have fond memories, but all the good things to remember are due to the group we travelled with. As far as Raj’s management is concerned, it was horrible. I would never consider Raj in future and would not recommend it to anybody.