Down Under EndeavoursReviews of downunderendeavours.com

We chose Down Under Endeavors to plan our honeymoon in New Zealand and the Cook Islands. Now I will say that our experience wasn't bad. Audra, our consultant, was super nice and she was able to organize our itinerary to where we could do everything we wanted to do. She's the reason why this isn't a 1-star review. The reason I am writing a bad review is the pricing. They market themselves as a "luxury travel agency" and when I got the itinerary with prices, I definitely knew they were going for luxury prices. I'm not one to just accept paying a large amount of money without doing some research to see where we could save. Using the itinerary, I looked up everything, thinking I could see where we were spending too much and ask for a downgrade on specific things. What a surprise when I added everything up and found that I was almost $2000 under their quoted CASH price (so we wouldn't have even gotten airline mile rewards unless we wanted to pay an extra $335). I asked Audra if there was a conversion issue because I couldn't understand how the price could be so different. She said that there were discrepancies due to us using non-refundable rate quotes for the hotels, pricing a different tour than they offered, and that their conversion rate was slightly higher (by 2 cents) than what Google said. Again, did my research. I updated all of the pricing and still came out to over $1000 saved if we booked ourselves. Audra contacted other departments in the company and came back with a one-time discount. Still wasn't enough to beat what we were seeing so we decided to book our honeymoon ourselves. I'm currently at $1800 under their quoted price. They put on their websites that "Unlike a travel agent, we don’t mark up every item on your itinerary. Instead, we charge a one-time planning fee, and all other costs go directly toward your trip." That doesn't seem to be true and honestly, I don't blame Audra for being limited by what her company gives her for rates. I should have known that a $250 planning fee wasn't enough to pay for this service. The one thing that extremely pisses me off (and the reason why I decided to write this review) is that we decided that we'd at least book our airfare through DUE. I couldn't figure out how they were getting really good prices on flights until after we booked the flights through DUE. Come to find out, if you book a "multi-stop" trip through Air NZ, you get better prices. And just for fun, I tried it out with our booked flights (since I had never done a multi-stop trip before). What a lovely surprise to find out that we were overcharged by exactly $150. I highly recommend that if you go with DUE, please do your research because I'm sure you'll find that you can save your money by booking directly with the hotels and activities. They say that all other costs outside of the planning fee go towards your trip and "our rates are certainly competitive with what you’ll find online" but I can't see any truth in that. On the plus side, this $250 planning fee (well I guess $400 total fee, with the $150 extra we paid for flights) got us a super detailed itinerary that we used to book everything ourselves. Not really worth it.

Down Under Endeavours initial proposal for our trip to New Zealand was ridiculously expensive and didn't really respond to our style of travel. Ultimately, I did a great deal of research, eliminated one city from our trip and several activities and located five star hotels in two of the cities we were visiting. We paid the $250 planning fee to get this far. After we were told that several of the hotels which we requested were not available, when in fact they were readily available on-line, we canceled. Despite a couple of requests for information about the rates that we were paying at 3 hotels, DUE refused to provide this information, claiming it was proprietary. Following our cancellation it became quite clear to me that we could have booked this trip ourselves for a good deal less money. Obviously, Down Under Endeavours was more interested in their own financial interests rather than ours

Overall, an average experience. They try some gimmicky pricing and deals to get you into an agreement with them. Pushing you to spend more for the trip and then "giving you a fee waiver" for being under the amount they will book. Many of their reviews talk about this but I didn't pay enough attention. Doesn't seem like too much detail went into the trip and our flight (booked separately but planned with our agent) back to the states was missed because our agent didn't take the timing into account. Big deal when you are on international flights. Left a couple activities because they were so boring and after learning we could not get money back for them. One activity that was booked, consisted of taking a 5 hour bus ride, then 2 hours on a boat, then 5 hours back on a bus. Our best memories were impromptu and made outside of the plans set. Will be planning our own trip next time or using another travel agent.