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“Star Tours - A Shattered Dream with Misspent Money”

written by on 10/05/2012

Allured by their ad, my wife and I flew to London for availing one of their tours. From the beginning, I was concerned about our seating position, and before leaving Canada, called Star Tours a number of times requesting for a couple of seats towards the front side. Every time, the impolite reply was: the seating arrangement was automatic, done by the computer according the booking order – and that there was no way to change it.
In the morning of April 25/12, a Star Tours bus picked us up at East Ham. The video of the bus shown on their website was a far cry from what the bus actually was. The front part of the lower luggage space was modified with low ceiling height to accommodate twenty additional seats totalling 77 tourist accommodations. At the gate the guide gave me seat numbers – the very last two positions at the hindmost row of the lower floor. After being seated, I looked around with great disappointment. At the front end of the aisle, a curtain blocked the forward vision. The small opening over the driver’s shoulder was blocked with two suitcases. The curtained windows were narrow compared to that of a standard tour bus, and the ceiling was low. Seat belts, control knobs for the air-vents, speakers etc. were all broken. The garbage sac was almost touching my left elbow, and the stinky toilet was just a metre away. With my wife seated at the window, I could see very little. When asked, the guide told that he had put all senior clients on the lower floor foreseeing their inability to climb to the upper floor! Later in the tour, he however took all those so called disables to the top of snow-covered Mount Titlis in Switzerland, and to the top of Eifel Tower in France involving a lot of stair climbing.
Seating in the half-dark chicken cage, the entire duration of the five-day excursion was full of anguish with constant irritation – not being able to have a look around the beautiful countries we had been passing through; have had paid extravagantly to see.
The guide quietly turned down seniors’ request to play some soft music instead of the incessantly blaring Indian movies. With one far-off small screen, the movies could not be watched either.