We had the worst experience with this travel agent, Rosie Allara. We planned our trip to the Middle…read moreEast - Jordan and Dubai. Both my husband and I have very busy schedules, we did not have time to do the planning ourselves, we needed a travel agent to do it for us. We clearly expressed it to Rosie. First red flag was on our first phone call. Our expectation for this call was that the travel agent would spend this call gathering information from us and asking questions about what we wanted this trip to be. Instead, after the initial couple of general questions, she started looking at prices of the hotels on her computer while we were on the phone and telling us what they were. After the first 15 minutes of this, we tried to steer her into what we thought the main purpose of the call was, but she would jump from one topic to the next and to the other and then back to looking at hotel prices again. It felt like she could not organize her thought process. Finally, after 45 minutes of being on the phone and being exhausted from a lot of jumping around and not being able to communicate to the agent in the organized manner, we decided to end the call with the agreement that we would communicate by email.
Rosie started looking for the airfair for us. Her prices were very high and the flights she kept offering were at a very inconvenient hours - in the middle of the night or very early in the morning or with very long layovers that would make the flight unnecessarily long. We explained to her that we prefer more comfortable times and flights since it was going to be our vacation. That did not change anything. After a lot of back and forth, we felt a lot of stress and pressure where she would say that there was nothing else she could find from her wholesaler. Feeling between the rock and a hard place, we ended up going on-line and looking for tickets ourselves. We found a very good price on Priceline, 35% less expensive that her price with comfortable hours and flights. We told her and she was OK with us purchasing the tickets on our own.
Now, we thought that the rest of the trip - hotels and organizing the itinerary would be fun and easy. Boy, were we mistaken. Rosie gave us an approximate/1st draft itinerary with some hotel suggestions. Being first time to the Middle East, we had questions about the itinerary and we did not like some of the hotels that she proposed. It would take her several days to respond to each email, and in her response she would ignore half of our questions. We had to send follow up emails, she would not respond for several days, then respond with half of the answers again. That was about the itinerary. When we asked for restaurant recommendations, entertainment recommendations, walkable streets where we could walk around in the evening, she would not know the answers at all. Her answer was "The information that I have is old and outdated, you can get this information from your hotel." Really? isn't it your job, as a travel agent, to have an updated information? Isn't this why we needed a travel agent so we don't have to scramble for this information when we are in a foreign country, not speaking the language. It was back and forth, we were running out of time, it was getting close to our trip time, we were not making any progress. She would not care about our time, she did not care about the information that we asked for. After 1.5 months, we felt that we did not accomplish anything, we did not get passed that first draft of the itinerary and unsuitable hotel recommendations. She did not complete a single thing for our trip. The only item that we had after working with Rosie for 1.5 months was the plain tickets that we purchased on our own. After depleting all our patience and being completely stressed out, we had to find another travel agent. Fortunately, he did a great job for us and we ended up having a great trip. As far as Rosie is concerned, even though she did not get anything done for our trip, she refused to refund the $300 fee that we paid her to prepare our trip. We believe that Rosie is completely disorganized and lacks knowledge in the travel industry. She indeed has outdated information from the time when she travelled to the Middle East herself 10 years ago. Even bigger problem is that she is not willing to do a new research and provide her clients with the new, updated information. If she is not interested in updating herself and all she does is re-use the same information year after year after year, she should not be in a travel industry that is constantly changing. In our case, we asked for a new information (like anybody else would), she just ignored us, did not respond to our emails, dragged her feet, ignored our questions, and wasted our time hoping that we would just go with it. Awful experience!
