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Overall, I was extremely disappointed in our trip to Italy. For the amount of money I paid and positive comments I had read, I was shocked by how many problems we had during our trip. Most of it was due to the poor planning. My trip advisor gave me a quote and told me that it would be best to pay for the trip ASAP so that I could secure the USD/EURO rate and then I was told to enter all of my personal information to include my flight times on the website. The day prior to our flight, I did a final review and saw that my general itinerary was wrong and that we were to arrive a day earlier than what I had entered which means we lost a day to recover and had to jump right into the tours (when I expressed my displeasure to my advisor, all she could say was that the iternary was final when I paid for everything. The only reason why I paid was so that I could secure the USD/EURO rate. I would not have paid if I had known that would have finalized my itinerary). When we finally arrived in country, we were so jet lagged we had to miss out on an afternoon of tours. Then upon review of the detailed itnerary that I was not provided, I discovered more mistakes and it turned out that we were scheduled for a tour to the Vatican that I did not request and that we were to leave from Florence instead of Rome. I never mentioned once that we were to leave from Florence and so I had to spend a day calling people so that I could secure transportation from Florence back to Rome, which consequently cost us another 575 EUROS. For that much, they had better provide a Mercedes not a Mini-van. Also, why weren't we provided lunch for the full day tours? All in all, I expected more from Kensington Tours and will be going to another tour guide/planner when I plan my trip to Ireland.
Thank you.
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
Just finished a Kensington trip to Scotland. Very similar experience to the ones described here. Some parts were excellent -- the walking tours of Edinburgh and Glasgow. But too often, there was a complete lack of coordination and the other tours were downright terrible -- "shared" tours on buses without air conditioning! And they sent us to an evening show in Edinburgh -- A Taste of Scotland -- that was just dreadful. We were stranded at the event because Kensington did not provide any transportation to us to get back. So in contrast to Tauck and other top tier tour companies, this was a real disappointment.
I just came back from a Kensington tour in Japan. It was very poorly planned by their travel consultant. most of the guides in the tours barely spoke English, one could not even translate a Japanese menu to us. One of the guides had his own scheduling and did not want to follow what our itinerary described. We were herded into buses and trains and were left behind at one station by the guide.
Some of the hotels we stayed in did not have us registered under our name, so when we showed up they could not find us in the system.
All and all it was an expensive poorly planned two week trip. Would I use them again, No Thanks!