Ellen
Experience with TA for our Australia trip
We started planning our trip to Australia in October, 2025 through our local Dream Vacation specialist for our trip just completed on October 16, 2026. Our TA rep was Adam Dela Roche. The information was very slow in coming. We originally had 4 ladies and then added 3 more. Throughout the year, 2 ended up dropping out. We were advertised to have a 7-person van for our transportation and we thought we were traveling as a group of 5. For reasons we never really understood, we were divided into 2 separate groups, so we had 2 itineraries that did not match. We were all told we would have the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour in Sydney and the Opera House tour. Those were not included in the second group and was not caught by our local travel specialist. Our final itinerary arrived 11 days before we traveled. This was the first time that we saw times for the tours and were not pleased to see 11 and 12 hour days. Very little information was provided about these tours, so, in some cases, we were not at all informed what to expect or what was entailed. We never did receive a final invoice, which we requested repeatedly. All we got was an amount in an email. Now, on to the trip. While I know we had 2 people cancel and 1 added that also dropped, the names provided to the hotel were most often not correct. Two of us missed the Sydney flight from LAX, so 3 arrived to check in the hotel. The names they had were completely wrong, so my roommate could not check in. While it was eventually resolved, the group was not at all happy. The 2 ladies that did not receive their HOHO tickets used the ones for the 2 ladies that had missed the plane. Basically we were told TA was not reimbursing for them because they weren't paid for. The same happened with the Opera House tickets. While we very much enjoyed our time in Australia, the itinerary setup by Adam left no breaks. We were exhausted each day, had no time to shop or take in the many sights our local tours recommended. I will not be referring your travel group in the future. While your response will likely make excuses for everything that went wrong and blame us, the customers, please save your time! I understand that Adam has left the company, but blaming him is not sufficient. Certainly hearing that you lost money on our trip or had a bad employee is no excuse for poor service! Ellen Odart



