Just a short while ago, I traveled with a large group to Walt Disney World. Our trip was planned and managed by Martin DeSanto from DeSanto Travel. To say that our trip was very stressful and unorganized is an extreme understatement. Our trip was filled with problem after problem which made for very stressful and frustrating portions of our trip.
For the flight to Orlando, our problems started before we even boarded the plane. Our travel agent seemed to have reversed the names of our entire group putting our first names in the last name slot and vice versa, which caused extreme hassle and frustration at the airport. Because of this, and the delays it caused, some of the members of my group almost missed their flight as they were caught up at security and such.
On Sunday, the day we were to come home, we ran into what I would call the biggest travel mess I have ever seen. To begin with, our group was split into 2 by our travel agent and not all placed on the same flight home. About 30 group members were placed on a flight home in the early afternoon and the rest of the group on a late-night flight home. Rather annoying, however we got over it. Arriving at Disney's Resort Airline Check-In in the morning began a day's worth of problems. We were informed that 2 chaperones, myself, along with 13 other members of my group did not have boarding passes to our flight. The agents could not find our flight information and/or ticket information. Long story short, our flight reservations were not there because our travel agent had booked the students on the earlier flight on both the later and earlier flights leaving 16 of us without tickets to come home. The 16 of us were forced to cut our day in Disney Springs short, which did not allow most of us to finish the shopping we wanted to do. We then were not able to take the Disney's Magical Express to the airport as we didn't have flight reservations. He then proceeded to blame one of our chaperones when they called to explain the situation and try to get help from him for it. Basically, we were told to handle the problem ourselves because it wasn't his problem and he didn't have time for us. Because of that, we were forced to pay over $200.00 for 3 taxis to take us to the airport. We arrived at the airport at 3:00 PM and our flight was not until 9:00 PM. After our arrival, we waited over 2 hours for our problem to be solved. In addition to that, names were spelled incorrectly on boarding passes which led to even more problems.
All of the problems listed above were preventable and should not have happened. The agency was little to no help in fixing any of these problems what-so-ever. To say I was extremely disappointed is an understatement. I guarantee that I will never be using DeSanto Travel for any of my future trips. If you are looking for a good travel agent to prevent problems like this from happening, I highly recommend you look someplace else, because DeSanto Travel is certainly not the place. read more