don't bother (Kuoni Travel)

Member Name: big-aj

Product:	Kuoni Travel
Date:	09/04/06 (765 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: unhelpful

Our first holiday with Kuoni was to Egypt and Jordan. This was in 2003 for a week. Firstly we arrived at Amman airport to be greeted by no-one, so I then phoned the local contact given to us by Kuoni. Once I managed to get through and speak to someone who spoke english, I was told that they had no confirmation who we were, I did no more but to contact Kuoni in England, luckily enough the office was still open, and as you can imagine my wife was distraught us being here in a foreign country, nobody around speaking english and a mobile bill which was getting more expensive by the minute. After a heated conversation with the manageress at Kuoni, we were told to stay put and wait for a call. After 30 mins we had not recieved a call so I contacted Kuoni again only to be told that our booking had been mis-placed. I then demanded that they sort this out immediately and was told that they would call me back. in the meantime I called the hotel to be told that we were not booked in. Well you can imagine my anger, soon after I recieved a call from Kuoni telling us that it had all been sorted out, but we had no transfer to the hotel and we would have to get a cab to Petra where we were staying, bearing in mind Petra was 120 miles away and would of cost 150 pounds and legally you were not allowed more than 200 pounds sterling, my temper finally blew, and after a few choice and harsh words from myself we finally got transport to our hotel. Upon our return to England we immediately got in touch with our booking agents who were very helpful in processing our complaint.We did recieve compensation for our trouble and was happy with the result

Now the story does not end there. The following year we booked a three week holiday to Thailand and Cambodia taking us to Bangkok Siem Reap (cambodia) and to Phuket. This was a holiday to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We were made priority with Kuoni who much to my surprise were very apologetic of our previous experience. We were promised the earth so we thought that we would give them another go. Very bad mistake! We arrived at Bangkok all was well we had three days there but disaater struck while we were there the 2004 Tsunami had struck,luckily enough for us we were in Bangkok had we have started our holiday in Phuket we may not have been her to write this comment. Anyway, we continued to Cambodia on the second leg of our holiday,whilst in contact with Kuoni who by the way could not be reached and seemed to disappear off the face of the earth when the Tsunami disaster occured. While in cambodia our holiday was severely dissrupted
having to have meetings and making calls on the remainder of our holiday. Kuoni had no idea of what to do we had reports of the reps fleeing and leaving customers stranded when the disaster struck. Anyway, we managed with the help of the local tour operator to sort out the rest of the holiday. We were given a choice, either accept a re-location or pay 200 pounds each to fly home early, we grudgingly took the re-location but in all fairness we were lucky some were not. After our return we again applied for compensation, this time we were not so lucky we lost the flight money from Bangkok to Phuket and the money I had spent on calls to the U.K. and Thailand. All in all Kuoni are the worst company we have ever travelled with and their customer service in our opinion is digraceful, their itineries are second to none but don't be fooled by this other companies offer good itineries at a cheaper price. We have been to many parts of the world with many companies and Kuoni is by far the worst

Summary: expensive, rubbish customer service, useless in a crisis