Mexico Lindo Tour - 8 Days

Traveler Reviews

• C

  Clayton

  January 5th, 2023
  2.0
  We enjoyed the trip overall, but I was very much NOT impressed with the organization or support from the Tourradar...
  We enjoyed the trip overall, but I was very much NOT impressed with the organization or support from the Tourradar and/or local overseeing agency. When I booked, the price was listed on a daily basis and was the same regardless of booking date, but after I had made the online booking, I was contacted via the site messaging system and informed that I would have to pay a surcharge per room for the hotel accommodations because it was "high season" -- it's not as if that wasn't a known phenomenon prior to booking, so if the fee is mandatory and the price is listed separately by date, why wasn't it included up front? I ended up paying the fee, but I find it dishonest not to just show the correct pricing prior to booking when such fees are not really optional. Our flights were delayed (as so many are these days!) on the way to Mexico City, and we missed a connection in Houston but were rebooked for a later flight. There were only machines answering any of the provided contact numbers; one was only in Spanish, and the other provided English menu options but disconnected immediately after providing the list rather than letting me actually pick any of them! I e-mailed and still have not received a response, even after the trip is over and I'm back home. I wrote on the tourradar message exchange system and got an answer, but it was clear that nobody actually bothered to read what I wrote -- they sent me an updated voucher for pickup at the airport with the ORIGINAL flight details still on it rather than the new ones. Ultimately, they claimed to have texted me without a response (which I later discovered was NOT a text message, as I had instructed, but instead, a WhatsApp message which I could not receive and thus had NOT listed as a viable option for contacting me!) and then listed us as a "no show" for the pickup, leaving us to arrange our own taxi to the hotel. Since that was literally the only service they were supposed to provide on what was listed as the first day of the tour, we essentially got nothing at all out of them for the first day other than a hotel reservation. It is thus a little questionable to even call it a 6-day tour, given that there are no actual activities scheduled for that first day and they failed to provide even an airport transfer! To add insult to injury, I had to pay for the taxi ride out of my own pocket in lieu of the transfer that was supposed to have been included. The tours on Days 2 and 3 in Mexico City and Teotihuacan were reasonably good, although the itinerary specifically mentioned getting to see the Quezlcoatl temple at Teotihuacan, but in fact, we saw only the pyramids of the sun and moon without so much as a mention of Queztlcoatl before we left the site, so that is somewhat misrepresented. This may have been because it took a long time for the guide to give the information in both English and Spanish -- he seemed to take a LOT longer with the Spanish speeches than the English version, so that may have put us short on time, but it's no excuse to short us on content that was specifically mentioned in the brochure. Day 4 was largely a travel day, so like the first day, there wasn't much included aside from some misinformation. The instructions specifically said we needed to arrive in Merida by 1 PM, prompting us to take an early flight out of Mexico City. This, in turn, meant we had to skip potential entertainment the night before in order to wake up early enough for our flight. When we arrived at the hotel in Merida, around 11:45, we were told that we wouldn't even be allowed to check in until 3PM! They held our luggage for us, but we were still left with nothing to do and no place to rest for about 3 hours when we could much more pleasantly taken a later flight and only arrived at the hotel by around 3 PM instead, had we been given accurate instructions. The one tour schedule for Day 4 was a city sightseeing tour scheduled for 4PM, so we checked in and then walked the 15 to 20 minutes to the park where we were to meet the tour (it doesn't pick up at the hotel!) only to talk to the tour operator there and find out that we had been rescheduled to 6PM, although nobody had actually bothered to inform us about that change. This was a bad move all around -- we had expected to be FINISHED by 6PM and then take an open-top bus tour at 6:30 PM, which we planned to arrange on our own. Instead, we rushed to the park for this tour, missing any possibly opportunity for other activities, only to find that we needed to kill another 2 hours. The lady with whom we spoke felt bad about it and gave us a sort of impromptu walking tour of the central plaza area, even though it wasn't her fault. By the time we finally started the included bus tour, it was already dark, and half the sights were architectural in nature and couldn't even been seen, as they were not lighted! All in all, this day was largely a frustrating waste of our precious time due to misinformation and disorganization from the provider's side. The only enjoyable parts of the day were the things we organized on our own to fill the voids that shouldn't have existed in the first place if the arrival and tour had been properly organized. The Merida tours on Days 5 and 6 were magnificent and were really the only saving grace of the package. It should be noted that while the booking interface lists the "number of seats remaining", implying that this is a cohesive tour group of some kind that will travel and tour together for the entire six days, it is, in fact, nothing but a series of independently booked day or half-day tours; there is no "tour group" and more importantly, no single "tour guide" to serve as a point of contact for us when something goes wrong, only the local tour guides who aren't even privy to the overall itinerary. Overall, there was no way to contact the tour booking agency / overall operator directly in any kind of a timely manner (they had no working English phone numbers and did not respond to e-mails) if there was any kind of real-time change or emergency, so the support was sorely lacking there in an age where air travel is almost always delayed or disrupted in some way. There was no tour group or overall guide travelling with us to look after anything at all, so we were largely left to our own devices with a lot of disjoined independent bookings for day trips and hotels that we could just as easily have booked on our own, likely for a lower price. The attractions themselves (Uxmal, Chichen-Itza, Teotihuacan, etc.) were good, but that was not due to any particular effort of the tour operator; the organization of the tour package overall was entirely lacking.Show more
  Traveled in December 2022
• A

  Amir

  January 3rd, 2023
  4.0
  Pretty good experience. Some minor logistical issues but generally happy with our tour. Thank you.
  Traveled in December 2022
  

  Reply from: SAT Mexico Tour and Travel

  Dear Amir R, Thank you very much for visiting us in Mexico and thank you for your excellent comments! We are delighted that we have met your expectations. Sincerely, SAT Mexico Tour and Travel 's Team

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