@leela – i did a 40 day trip from capetown to nairobi with a group called nomad tours with most of its travelers from germany and other european countries. i did a short gorilla trek tour with africa tour company aka ATC with many travelers from the UK and Australia/New Zealand. i thought both nomad and ATC did great jobs on the tour. the tours that i saw on the road with a lot of partying tended to be operated by intrepid and oasis.

We emailed them about our concerns with the tour leader and they took it quite seriously – they sent an email apology, letting us know that the tour leader was suspended and put under review, as other travelers had complained as well. In addition to this, they offered us a rather substantial refund, and gave us travel credits for future trips.

Very reassuring that they acted so quickly to rectify this!

EVERY GAP Antarctica cruise this season (from October onwards) has been canceled one after another 1-4 weeks before departure. A bit of research online will confirm this to be true.

The MS Expedition’s “mechanical difficulties” may be out of GAP’s control but the time they gave their customers to make rearrangements was in their control. GAP could and should have warned passengers booked on these “100% Guaranteed Departure” trips of a problem AS SOON AS the problem was first identified (ie. early October). That would have been fair. Instead, they held off as long as possible before each and every departure date because it was in the the Company’s best interests to do so.

Because of the short time frame given, available options were limited to say the least. My accommodation deposits and flights were non-refundable at that late stage and my travel insurance would not cover anything because they considered it GAP’s responsibility. GAP did not agree. The good news is that I was lucky and was able to hop aboard another ship with another operator (Quark) departing that day and, thankfully, I had a fantastic trip in the end :)

I’ve never used GAP, but have used Intrepid last year on a 4 week tour through South East Asia (’Great Indochina Loop’ – Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia). Overall I would say it was a great trip, extremely well organized and great value for money. I could have never ever managed to see as much in 4 weeks on my own. And most importantly, as female solo traveller I would have never dared to travel to certain regions on my own. What I didnt like about the trip had more to do with the pros/cons of group travel described so well on this website than with anything that was done ‘wrong’ by Intrepid. The only thing I might criticize was the slightly unbalanced amount of time we spent in some of the countries, compared to others. For instance Vietnam could have easily been cut short (spent almost half our time there), whereas Cambodia felt like we were rushing through. But that was my personal view, others may have perceived this differently. One point everyone disliked on my trip was the ‘homestay’ in a village in Laos. That was the only time I felt like a tourist. Although it is supposedly designed to meet the locals, the locals seemed utterly disinterested in even meeting their overnight guests. It just felt like an artificial and forced experience and the only time I felt like a typical tourist. One particularly positive thing I’d like to point out about Intrepid is the accomodaton used on this original trip. I expected some pretty basic lodgings throughout, but in actual fact basic guesthouses were intermixed with some really great hotels and all of them always very clean.

One word about our leader travelling with us – she was fantastically organized, even though she wasnt an easy personality and her habit of bashing some of her former group members got on everyones nerves pretty quickly. But reading these posts it seems that so much really depends on the guides you end up with.

I’m now planning a trip to either China or Japan and I’m undecided whether I should go with Intrepid again or try GAP. Has anyone been on any GAP trips in Japan?

The tour leader did not accompany us on our excursions, disappeared during the day and was difficult to find during the evening. This made coordinating excursions through him very challenging. Oftentimes, we ended up investigating and booking excursions on our own, and we had to pay higher-than-anticipated rates because we weren’t in a large group and had to book individually.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the itinerary has a lot of mentions of ‘we can’ or ‘optional activities may include’ rather than firm commitments of what is on offer. This is highly dependent on a motivated and organized tour leader. We lacked on, and many times during the trip, we were instructed that we had a specific departure time (usually an early-morning departure) only to find out that the tour leader had misled us about booking our tickets. In one case, in Oaxaca, the tour leader told us that we would be leaving at 9:00 am (noting specifically that tickets had already been purchased). The evening before we were set to leave, he left a note at the front desk of the hotel saying that all morning departures from Oaxaca had been sold out and that we had no other choice but to leave at 2:00 the next afternoon. We were shocked and confused by the change, and, since our tour leader wasn’t around to explain things, we decided to contact the bus company to see what had happened. We found out that there were more than 30 seats available for three earlier departure times but he decided not to book them. This proved very frustrating and disappointing, as we had been looking forward to visiting a temple near our next destination, but would not be able to see it because we were leaving too late in the day.

Similar incidents happened in other cities, which meant that it was very difficult for us to judge and juggle our itineraries. Because of these disruptive, unnecessary and unplanned itinerary changes, we frequently ended up having to abandon our travel plans and were left with entire mornings and afternoons with nothing to do but wait around at bus stations for 3 – 4 hours. It felt like entire days from our itinerary got erased because our tour leader didn’t follow through with early-enough departures, or let us know that we would have an extra morning to more thoroughly explore the city we were in.

Don’t get me wrong – there was a lot to like about this trip. On the whole, our hotels were quiet, clean and comfortable. The buses we traveled in were impeccably clean and safe. The trip itinerary, as advertised, provided a fantastic mix of ruins, cultural activities, and outdoor excursions. But the follow-through required of our leader to make this itinerary come to life, was sorely missing.

I sincerely want to believe that this problem was the failing of our specific tour guide, and not reflective of GAP itself. In some hotels we stayed at, other GAP tour leaders had left information for their travelers, like sign-up sheets for day excursions or details & highlights of the particular cities we were in. In one city, our tour intersected with another GAP tour (the same trip heading in the reverse direction) and we had the opportunity to have a day excursion with a different tour leader. She was great – organized, friendly and engaged. Our particular tour leader not only lacked a sufficient attention of detail and organization, but he didn’t seem interested in helping us out or keeping our group on track at all.