For a company with such a great reputation and a host of very positive reviews, it pains me to be 'bucking the trend' and posting a negative review regarding my recent experience with Trailfinders (Norwich). Nevertheless, I can only speak as I find and on this occasion they were found sadly wanting. My complaint (as already made to them) concerns their failure to assist with re-booking a cancelled excursion during my trip to Australia. My partner and I were already halfway through our trip 'down under' when they e-mailed me to say a Great Barrier Reef day trip from Cairns had been cancelled (no explanation as to why) and they couldn't help with finding any alternative! It was very much a case of, "Sorry mate - sort it out yourself"! They merely 'washed their hands' of the problem - not what one expects when one has just spent over £40k with them! Despite me repeatedly asking them to help, the attitude of the Duty Manager was entirely negative, unhelpful and uncaring. I then had to spend hours searching online for an alternative, with limited Internet access at a time when I should've been relaxing in the sunshine. Of course things can go wrong that are outside the Tour Operator's control, but it is when this happens that the real professionals get things sorted rather than just walking away. Sorry Trailfinders, but you did not demonstrate that professionalism on this occasion and given what I ended up having to book myself was a poor substitute for the original, my partner and I felt very let down. It's back to Audley Travel for us in the future. There is a Tour Operator/Travel Agent who DOES know how to look after their clients!

Went into there Milton Keynes branch on the 10th of April, asked a rather large lady about a all inclusive holiday for this coming April, she was do rude and lazy as she said we don't do that sort of thing and I should try Tui or Virgin holidays, so in other words they are not a expert travel agent at all, I'm not sure who the are but there staff are usless to be honest.

We spent 4 weeks last year refining our itinerary with the Winchester office. The person we were dealing with left the company and the person who took over changed half of the flights to a different airline. We were assured that the new airline was a One World alliance so we proceeded with our booking. We subsequently discovered that Singapore Airlines are not part of the One World alliance and we later found out that instead of booking a multi-stop ticket TF had booked three separate tickets so we had three separate baggage allowances, one of which was just 20Kg. We've been collected BA loyalty points for over 20 years and missed out on 80,000 Avios points and 500 tier points by flying with Singapore Airlines instead of BA. Furthermore, the restricted baggage allowance prevented us purchasing any souvenirs or momentums during our 9-week holiday. TF have refused to compensate us, except to offer a £150 voucher. We're not impressed and we will never ever use Trailfinders again.

This review refers to the Trailfinders travel agency, not the Safari itself or the company who run it. Awful experience. We spent almost 6 days out of a 14 day vacation stuck in airports and crappy airport hotels. A waste of time and money (because they did not cover our extra expenses, of course) that could have been avoided had they booked the flights we asked in first place (we even offered to pay for them ourselves on top of the vacation package) A travel agency who won't even book a flight? What is the point? And, by the way, the seven day safari in Kenya is actually only five days. Day one is spent stuck in one of the worse hotels we've ever been to, without even an outdoor area! and Day 7 is spent driving back to the airport. I've never dealt with such an incompetent, dismissive, disrespectful and deceiving company. Do not recommend.

My wife and I have recently returned from a 2 centre Thailand holiday arranged for us by Trailfinders from the Winchester office. All holiday details - flights, connections , pickups etc were perfect, with very professional services provided by local personnel. Unfortunately, the second hotel was not to our liking as there were many steps and no bannisters etc, and we thought it to be slightly unsafe for elderly guests. Therefore we decided to move hotel. After finding a suitable alternate hotel close by, we informed Trailfinders 24/7 hotline of our intentions, and reasons why. They were excellent in their dealing of the situation, contacting both the hotel we were leaving and the new hotel we were moving to. Trailfinders explained to the new hotel they would organise payment and not to charge us anything until all matters had been completed, it really eased our minds. Although half way round the world, we were kept updated daily, and between Trailfinders, the hotel and ourselves, organised a final small payment, and continued our holiday very happily. I couldn't recommend Trailfinders enough - from their initial organisation to their customer Services whilst abroad - everything was excellent. I will definitely use Trailfinders in the future.

Previously booked many Worldwide trips with TF. Not for a few years though due to the pandemic. Having just done so again I am regretting it. This once great travel specialist is now a very average High Street travel agent at best but without the service. Over 1 hour to get through to someone (usually in a completely different part of the country to where they are stated to be.....why?) or have to use the "portal". They respond by phone (eventually but I have had experience of over 1 week) and leave a message so that you have to spend another 1 hour plus on hold to call them back. Their lateness and lack of information has now cost me £300. They don't care. After over 30 years I will be taking my details off their database. There is much better out there. An expensive mistake.

Since Brexit, the EU no longer accepts UK passport expiry dates. They take 10 years from issue date. So despite having 10 months left on my passport, I'm unable to travel with my wife and young children on a £6k trip of a lifetime. This is buried deep in the documents from Trailfinders but it's badly worded and at no point did the consultants think to bring this up, even on the pre-departure courtesy call. Specifically, the guidance says "you must have a minimum of 6 months validity on your passport which cannot be older than ten years". My passport (at the date of this trip) is not ten years old and it has >6 months validity until the printed expiry date. I feel pretty stupid, but this is a fairly subtle thing which I would expect a traditional travel agent like Trailfinders to draw attention to. I will book future holidays online - there's no point in having the human element. My cousin got the same package through TUI for half the amount as well. So save your money - go elsewhere. I was also asked to withdraw my similar review comment on trust pilot, as it will help them resolve this situation for me. Somewhat sinister and far from true customer service.

I did the PCR Fit to Fly test at 9.30am based on the fact that the results will come out by 10pm the following day. The next day I waited and waited it was almost 10pm and I didn't receive my result. I started getting worried as I had a flight to catch so I tried calling them and was surprised that they had no customer service number. The only option was to submit a form so I submitted one and they never EVER got back to me. My results came out at 1am and my flight had already gone. Will never do a PCR there again and would NEVER recommend this service to anyone as these guys are unpredictable and cannot be trusted with timings!!! I literally wasted £80, just thrown like that in the garbage!

This is the second time we have contacted Trailfinders. The first time they were not competative with a quote we were given. The second time, a couple of weeks ago we contacted them again, hoping the first contact was just a blip. Again, no-one has come back to us with a quote ? Why is that ? Surely even a courtesy call ? Nothing. I thought they were there to sell holidays. As this is the 2nd time no-one has bothered to contact us you could not recommend a company that simply doesn't get back to potential customers. Very disapponting.

Had flights with Singapore Airlines(SA) from Melbourne to UK in April stopped as SA would not allow transit through Singapore. Conflicting advice from Trailfinders on whether we should attempt to board or not. Trailfinders advised us to cancel and get a refund. Seems like wrong advise and we are still waiting for Trailfinders to obtain a refund from Singapore Airlines even though other people who booked directly on the same flight have received refunds. They should stop bookings with SA until they pay up.

We booked a holiday of a lifetime with Trailfinders after researching a few specialist companies. Over three weeks in Western Canada and Alaska, no expense spared, full of activities. Cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. We were kept informed by the company at all times, and we requested a refund which was honoured in full. If we had booked our dream holiday without using Trailfinders, I'm sure we would be out of pocket. When it's the right time for us to re-book we will use Trailfinders again, an absolute gem of a company.

I have been a loyal Trailfinders customer for over 25 years, and have spent in the region of GBP 30,000.00 with them on business and personal travel for myself and my family over this period. Trailfinders like to position themselves as a trusted brand. Their website bangs on about this at length, however recently we have had a series of experiences with them which collectively have been so bad that we have not just stopped recommending them to friends, family and colleagues, but would now never use them again. Failure No 1/Hotel Recommendations: Trailfinders arranged a trip to New York for us over New Year 2018/9. They recommended the Hudson Hotel in mid town Manhattan, a recommendation I accepted without doing too may checks on it myself because I trusted that they would have vetted the place first. The hotel was a shambles. It was very poorly managed, the food was atrocious and the infrastructure of the building was creaking. Anyone who wants to know how bad it is has only to read the dismal reviews on TripAdvisor, some of which go back several years, to see how inadequate this place actually is. When we returned from this trip, I asked Trailfinders how they could possibly recommend a hotel with such poor reviews. They assured me that they do their own checks. I sent a long list of problems to them at their request and never had any response. A surprising and disappointing experience from a company that I trusted to do a lot better. Failure No 2/No Email: I booked several trips with Trailfinders in 2018. All agent dialogue has to happen on the phone; there is no ability to correspond by email. As we approach the third decade of the twenty first century, I find it incredible that I cannot organise a trip using the de facto medium of communication in the first world. The consequence of this failure is that when I want to deal with an agent they are rarely available and when the agent calls me it is always at an inconvenient time. The whole experience is archaic and arcane and leads to huge frustration and wasted time. Failure No 3/Trailfinders Travel Insurance: This is by far the biggest failure and is the one that has finally convinced us never to have anything to do with Trailfinders again. When we have recounted this problem to friends and colleagues, they have all been shocked. Further, there are a series of complaints on Trust Pilot and Service Centre that describe the same failure. Last year, we took Trailfinders’ Annual Travel Insurance for the second year. We took it because we believed the policy to be safe, comprehensive and because we trusted the Trailfinders brand. We could have paid less for annual cover with another provider, but we paid a premium for this policy because we believed it would cover us in the event of a loss. As it turned out, it doesn’t. In late January, we were both victims of a theft at Madrid airport which occurred in the secure baggage area. Items of jewellery and electronic equipment were stolen from our locked suitcases. The combination locks had not been touched and the bags had not been damaged in any way, so the only way the thief could have got into the case was by using a customs security key. After reporting this theft to the Spanish National Police (who took no interest in even understanding the circumstances of the theft), we claimed on our Trailfinders Travel Insurance. The loss amounted to just under GBP 1,000.00 and included some very personal items. In the end, the loss was settled by Trailfinder’s third party claims handlers for GBP 5:00. An insult. The stated reason for this was that loss of valuable items in a locked suitcase is not covered when the baggage is entrusted to a third party, an airport baggage handler in this case. We did nothing wrong here. We locked the suitcases. We saw the suitcases tagged and dispatched to a secure handling area. We trusted the airport operator and we trusted that, in the event of a problem like this, our travel insurance would cover us for the loss. The whole point of taking travel insurance is to cover a loss such as this. Trailfinders position this insurance as ‘Safe, Extensive and Trusted’. It is none of these things. Trailfinders’ told me that most UK travel insurance policies don’t cover this type of incident. But some do, RAC Global Travel Insurance for example, so why don’t they? This failure, by far the worst, is the final nail in the Trailfinders’ coffin and is the reason why we will never use or recommend them again. On the contrary, we will use every opportunity to tell this sorry story to friends, relatives and colleagues to dissuade then them from using this once trusted brand.

We have recently returned from a road trip to western USA, covering all the main sites including Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey and LA. We asked Trailfinders to organise the trip for us after being recommended by a relative who had used them. Both my wife and I work full time and we didn't have much time to research the trip as thoroughly as we would normally wish, hence the "trust" in Trailfinders. The trip was amazing as anyone being to these places will testify, but the organisation from Trailfinders was disappointing to say the least. We had contacted a specific (recommended) person initially who took in all our requirements, sent us the itinerary and then wasn't contactable again until we had paid for it all. In the meantime we had to deal with other representatives. We had specifically asked for 4 or 5 star hotels in the stop overs and wanted realistic travel times between these. Clearly all that happened was that Trailfinders looked up distances and road travel times on Google Maps and sent these to us without taking into account the actual road, eg twisting mountain passes or volume of traffic around cities in California. So a "4 hour itemised journey" actually was an 8 hour journey. They didn't check the hotels, and whilst some were nice quality (eg. Oasis in Death Valley - actually the only hotel around there!), others were dreadful. We were recommended to stop over in Pismo Beach (which I can only describe as worse than Paignton in Devon) at the Spyglass Hotel that was no more than a cheap-looking motel. Similarly, there could not be a more noisy hotel than the Hotel Zephyr in San Francisco; right on the Wharf and seemed to be built out of cardboard! The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in LA was nice but poor location as it was a little way out from (main) Venice Beach or Santa Monica. I don't believe that Trailfinders had been to the majority of hotels that they booked us into, and disappointingly did not adhere to what we requested. They gave us an itinerary which was fine, but then Google Maps and internet booking took over which I could have done better - and saved paying them their enormous commission! The bottom line: don't use Trailfinders, make enough time to do your own research, book the flight and hotels yourself and save a fortune!

Awful experience of Trailfinders. Lack of knowledge, poor service and in the end we could not do the holiday because of a visa situation, where they gave us no information and no help. Very poor complaints procedure and then when we tried to complain to ABTA (as they said we could do) we found out that they had just left the scheme. We would advise people to look elsewhere!

I have always booked my holidays independently after having a bad experience 15 years ago through a travel agent. A friend however highly recommended Trailfinders so I gave them a ring to see what they could offer.The sales assistant was so nice I decided to go with them even though price was £500 higher. I had already my route planned & some hotels provisionally booked but she insisted their hotels were superior and I had the security of a travel agent etc etc should anything go wrong. Well things did go wrong but unfortunately Trailfinders didn't want to know. Flights overbooked, hotel rooms overbooked, location of some hotels ridiculous & away off the route we were travelling.The quality of some hotels really poor. They appear to use an agent in Canada called JonView to secure cheap rates & obviously inferior rooms.The price initially quoted was increased a few times as the hotels they had priced for were booked up & they had to source alternative hotels ???? The trips they booked on our behalf were disappointing. Overall the holiday ended up costing approx £1000 more than I could have booked it for directly. The only reason I gave 2 stars was for the lovely girl I dealt with in Belfast office.

A poor experience overall. We booked our holiday in the Exeter branch of trailfinders - a cruise that we thought would take a short while. In fact, we spent a whopping 2 1/2 hours in the shop, as the assistant either couldn't work or was unfamiliar with the clunky IT. In addition, he had virtually no corporate knowledge of Venice(!) and was unable to book hotels in the area to extend our stay. This resulted in us having to book our own hotel for the return journey, only to be informed with less than 12 hours notice that our journey was to be cut short (whilst we were on the cruise). In sum, poor IT combined with an ambivalent service and lack of local knowledge (literally) cost us dear and seriously damaged the overall enjoyment factor. Never again!

After complaining about the disgusting hotel provided to my daughter and her friend in Orlando (I booked their accommodation) leaking roof in their room, rubble in corridors and external doors open to the public, and not getting any satisfaction from Trailfinders I left it in the hands of my solicitor who acted for the girls. They were paid compensation. I later asked for a quote and was surprised to find I was blacklisted as follows:- Good Afternoon We have reviewed your enquiry, and in consideration of the past difficulties that you have experienced with our service, we have taken the decision not to provide a quote. I regret that we are unable to assist you further. Kind Regards General Manager W trailfinders Subscribe to our newsletter