I went on recent Koh Samui and Bangkok trip with Wander Womaniya. Really disappointed by the way trip went due to below reasons:
1. Only 20% of the money paid was actually spent on the trip. When I asked Anuj(founder who accompanied us on the trip) about this, he mentioned that 70-80 percent money goes into customer acquisition. I spent the money to have good comfortable hotel on the trip but ended up staying in a low budget hotel with very small rooms which costed hardly 1000-1500 per day per person.
2. There was literally no planning. Everyone travelled at different timings due to bad communication, no coordination or guidance at all on what to do at the airport.
3. He also had no clue about the restaurants/activities at the location. I could feel that he hasn’t done even the 2 min quick google search of good restaurants or places to go. We only did that when we found him clueless and went. He took us to smelly fish market in place of veg restaurant as he asked someone on the spot and they understood wrong due to language gap which could have been avoided with a basic search on google maps.
4. There was no intention to help as well. Me - "Can we have early check-in?" Anuj - "You can call the hotel and check"; Girls on trip - "Can we ask this tuktuk to take us further to more place if we pay extra personally?"(as all planning was done only for 2-3 hours per day) Anuj - "Yeah. Go ahead and ask them"; Anuj - "In Bangkok, you can get either very good food or very bad food" Me - "Ok so where do we find good food". Anuj - "I don’t know". There was literally no value added of him accompanying us on the trip. We could have easily gone on a solo trip saving 80% of the cost or having really lavish trip at the same cost.
5. 1-day trip got cancelled due to weather so he just went ahead and booked for pig island visit without even informing anyone or even making any efforts to make the plan better. When everyone expressed that they are not interested in watching pigs, he said there is nothing else on the island so we have to just go with this so either stay on hotel or come along for the pig island. No apology, no regret, no effort to keep the enthu of the group up (more of "aana hai to aao or get lost" attitude), no effort at all to search for alternatives options. Finally, we decided not to go to watch pigs and did some quick enquiry at the hotel reception and on google ourselves and found 2-3 different and really good options(all of which individually turned out to be the best experiences in the trip).
In the last, he apologised saying sorry I didn’t have time to plan due to some personal commitment without understanding that it might be just one trip for him but from my perspective, I have put my life savings, left my 3-year-old son alone with my husband to have some good time, had a very critical launch in office so somehow convinced my team and manager to allow me. Even if he was busy he should have assigned this to someone else in his team or planned it for some other days when he was free rather than screwing up the trip for everyone.
One good thing was that I met lovely ladies who made the trip really nice and we all together made separate plans as soon as we realised that Wander Womaniya hasn’t done anything good or invested any time on our trips.