Ivy T.
GRE has totally lost my trust
GRE has totally lost my trust, and this is even before my trip has begun. So I find myself in the horrible situation of having to go on the trip with GRE because I have made both the deposit and balance payments, while praying hard that there won't be any more nasty surprises. There are 3 serious issues with their service: 1) Transparency 2) Honesty 3) Reliability My friend and I have been planning for this trip since June, and I made the deposit for my itinerary on 2nd July to "seal in the hotel rates", as I was advised. So I made the deposit of $430 to the quote of 7K for 2 persons, and informed the travel consultant to cancel all rail tickets and guided tours for Western Europe as I had I had Eurail passes and only needed help for booking of hotels. I wanted to retain the suggested itinerary only for the Eastern Europe bit of my trip as I was exploring cities I had not been to previously. Fortunately, I downloaded the PDF version of the itinerary with the quotation price and the list of hotels I would be booked into for each of the cities, though not all of them were listed at that time. I reconnected with GRE on 14th of July to to check if my hotel bookings have been confirmed, and I did not hear back from my travel consultant until 18th July when someone in operations sent me an email to make the balance payment by Jul 22nd for my trip coming up on 4th Aug. I did not want to make the balance payment because 1) the itinerary had NOT been revised to remove the rail tickets for the Western Europe leg, and 2) the travel consultant had not confirmed that all hotels were booked. My travel consultant only managed to confirm all hotel bookings on 21st July, and that he had removed the rail tickets from my itinerary and quote. On 22nd July, another consultant sent an email to me, to inform me that if I did not make payment by 24th July now, that they would be cancelling my trip (no information what would happen to my deposit for 2 people - there was no such notification during the time of payment that my deposit would be forfeited if I didn't make my payment by the 22nd, and now the 24th). And she quoted me the revised quotation AFTER removing the rail tickets, which came up to $7,492! I wanted to know why my quote went up instead of down after removing the rail tickets, and she told me she would check with the original travel consultant who couldn’t be reached at the moment and urged me to make the balance payment first. I told her that the new quote was over my budget, and that I wouldn’t be going ahead with GRE at that price. On 23rd Jul, I was sent an email that she had sat down with the original consultant, and had managed to bring my quotation down to $6,993. So I told her that it still did not make sense to me, that if I made a deposit to seal my price at 7K, why after removing rail tickets costing $400, that my cost is still at $6,993. Until this was sorted out, I was prepared to let my deposit go and just make my own hotel bookings and local tours. On 24th Jul, today, my “deadline”, she finally told me that they managed to sort it out. The system had accidentally booked 2 unlimited Swiss rail pass for in Switzerland instead of normal rail tickets, and that my new quote was now $6,664. That sounded reasonable, and as they sounded sincere, I was relieved that things were sorted out a week before my trip and that I would not have to make my own bookings and plans as I was clearing work to go for my holiday. After I had happily made the balance payment for the trip, I went back to my itinerary to check the locations of my hotels so that I could figure out where the nearest u-bahns, metro stations, etc were, I realised to my horror that a number of my hotels had been downgraded by 1 star. The 4 and 5 star hotels that I had paid the deposit for on 4th July, had been replaced with 3 and 4 star hotels. And in my itinerary I had indicated that I would like a minimum of 4 star hotels to be booked. The feeling in the pit of my stomach cannot be described. Its the feeling where you know you have been skinned. You hope, and do not want to believe it to be true, but you know it. And my trip hasn’t even started yet. So, I have gone back to them on this issue, but both travel consultants cannot be contacted because they have left for the day. I requested for the travel consultant who answered to relay my message that I expect the hotels I paid for to be reinstated at NO additional cost. Hopefully they get back to me tomorrow, now that I have made the balance payment and am stuck with them. Will keep you posted, but DO be careful and take note of the prices you were quoted on, and in checking any changes in your itinerary if there were changes made to your hotels and transfers!