I recently booked a Cancun vacation through Charlie Brown Good Time Travel. I chose to use a travel agency (instead of booking it myself online) because I am not familiar with international travel, nor with planning week-long family vacations.
I’m horribly disappointed with the service that this company provided for my recent trip.
First, I had to plan all of our vacation activities – the travel agent, who kept telling me how much she loved Cancun, gave me little to no input on how we could best spend our vacation time in Mexico.
Second, there was minimal contact from the travel agent or ANYONE in this company between the time I booked the vacation and the time we left. In fact, I had to call your office the day before we were scheduled to leave to see if there was anything I needed, because the ONLY confirmation I had of my vacation was a charge on my debit card, a preliminary print out of the flights and a magazine that showed the hotel amenities. The travel agent told me that I needed all my travel documents and that she had been on vacation and had forgotten to notify me that I had to pick them up. This is completely unprofessional.
Third, our family was NOT prepared for this trip. I believe that one of the agents duties, as a travel agency, is to take the burden of preparation OFF of your customers and make sure that they enjoy the vacations that they have saved up for. We were never told when we should be at the airport. We arrived at DIA just under 2 hours before the flight was scheduled to leave. United Airlines told us that, because we were not there MORE than 2 hours early, they would not let us fly, nor credit our flight toward a later flight. We had purchased the travel insurance so I called United Vacations who told us that if we still wanted to go on our vacation, we would need to fly the next day and pay an additional $4,900 – which is significantly MORE than we paid for the entire vacation.
I did not want to disappoint our family so I took the initiative and went over to the Frontier Airlines counter and paid an additional $1,400 to fly with them to Cancun that day. From there I was notified (from a Frontier employee!!) that United was cancelling our return flights as well. I had to spend the rest of the day convincing United to let us fly home at the end of the week. Dealing with United was a terrible experience and we will never fly with them again.
This ALL could have been avoided if your company and the companies you chose to affiliate with (United Vacations) provided better customer service.
Because of this stressful and expensive experience we will never book our vacations with Charlie Brown Travel, nor will we ever recommend your services to our family, friends or colleagues.