We went to…

Ha Noi
Ha Long Bay
Hoi Chi Min City
Chu Chi Tunnels
Mekong River
Mui Ne

First impressions have been amazing! Some stuff that comes to mind…

• Toilets (heated) with so many buttons that you dont have a clue what does what
• Fish Fish Fish – There’s a whole lotta fish!
• The japanese trains are awesome. The fastest and most efficient i’ve ever seen
• The people are incredibly respectful of tourists and each other
• Technology is well ahead
• It’s hotter than the sun
• Tokyo is mental
• When you enter a shop they all shout to greet you

Here’s the first set of pics from Tokyo…

Some highlights…

You don’t have to look hard to find negative reviews of the company, in fact you only have to Google or search for its brand name ‘Goldtrail Holidays’ and this is what potential customers will see.

5 of the top 10 results in Google UK could be seen as negative. That’s 50% of their first page SERPs, bare in mind that under a very few ever bother to follow onto the next page of the SERPs I should think this massively affects them.

This coupled with the unfortunate fact that a high authority site like BBC Watchdog exposed their shoddy antics really doesn’t help their brand’s reputation online, having a greater resonance in the echoe chamber of the blogosphere and a lot of links and eyeballs pointing to the negative article means it’s gonna rank high pretty quickly.

With the majority of reviews on the ever popular travel review site Trip Advisior also being negative it doesn’t look too good.

You can go with the old saying that any PR is good PR but in this case i’m not convinced.

They’re not listening…

Some companies taken to the age of networks and the Web 2.0 era of the internet, empowering the consumers to have a voice and be heard, in a positive way. Take how Dell have used ‘Ideas Storm’ for instance. They use it as a channel to engage with their customers as taking negative feedback online and using this new found knowledge for better product development.

Goldtrail, and i’m sure there are many others in the travel industry, simply seem not to care or are that uneducated in the power of the web that they’re missing out. There online presence is weak, I can barely find any up to date content on their website (with a copyright that went out of date on it in 2005) never mind anywhere else where they may have been talked about in their online network. They seem to be missing  a trick in not listening to people online and ultimately probably missing out on a shed load more sales as a result.

Relying on 3rd party operators?

Perhaps Goldtrail’s brand reputation bares little importance to them as opposed to others. Like myself, I didn’t actually realise we were even travelling with them. We booked our holiday through Kwik Travel and were none the wiser (very lazy and naive I know!).

However, they do have acquisition on their site, this coupled with those travellers that are slightly more switched on than we were could account for a large lump of potential customers.

If I were Goldtrail’s exec i’d be having word with my marketing department!

On the 1st to the 8th  of August 2009 myself and two of my close friends decided to book a holiday to Turkey.

We all work full time and despite being well travelled individuals thought due to ease (lads being lads) that we would book our weeks break a few weeks before departure and to make things even easier and book an all inclusive to make things even easier. We were booked into the 5 star Hotel Etap Altinel near Bodrum.

Note: Although this sounds like a ‘lads’ holiday, (which in essence it was) it was more of a chilled break . We all work full time and have very busy lives, one of us a professional rugby player and the other two take rugby quite seriously so it was never going to be a 6 night bender, more like a planned 2 bigger nights and the others spent playing some cards, having a few quiet drinks and enjoying each other’s company.

The all inclusive didn’t come cheap either, 3 of us sharing a room came to just under £2100. However we felt the spend was almost justified with the hotel being rated as a ‘5 sun’ by Goldtrail and having all our drinks and meals included and only being able to travel at peak time.

It’s still the most i’ve ever spent on a 7 day holiday though! We’re all very easy going guys and don’t often like to complain, but the facilities, staff and eventful bit of food poisoning tipped us over the edge!

Here’s the lowdown on what simply wasn’t up to standard for a 3 star never mind a 5 star hotel!

The Room

Air Conditioning disabled…we were told that we had to pay £25 for this (5 Star Hotel in a boiling hot country)

• Dirty fridge
• Leaking shower
• Exposed wires
• small and very uncomfortable beds
• Towls only changed once (despite using them to mop the leaking floor)

The Staff

Most couldn’t speak English and we perceived quite unhelpful due to this, despite our best efforts to be nice to them

The Gym

• Appauling!
• No Aircon
• Weights hanging on by a thread on machines
• Nothing to secure free weights
• Complete lack of equipment
• Dirty

The Sauna/ Massage facilities

• Dirty
• Smelt of sewage

The Pool

• Good size
• Water features surrounding never worked
• Children’s pool particularly dirty

The tennis court

Out of action and massively in need of repair!

The Food

• The food was below standard and now where near the quality that you would expect from a 5 star hotel.
• Food was re-used e.g. Eggs used in the morning were re-used at lunch, simply by drizzling a 1000 island sauce over them, most of the food was bland and catered mostly towards eastern Europeans.

The Drink

• Table water poored from jugs which we’re sure came from the taps and not bottles…(advised against drinking tap water)
• Alcohol – barely tasted alcoholic, potentially watered down but also a very disapponiting selection, not that we were able to drink hardly any of it! (see samonella  below)

On the facilities, basically this video, filmed by Peter Gray who was there roughly the same time as us explains it all…

Catching Salmonella

We weren’t happy with the supposed 5 star accommodation to say the least, especially considering the amount of money that we had payed. We arrived on the Saturday and to our normally very sturdy stomach’s disappointment we felt sick just after we had eaten form the mixed buffet on Monday lunch time.

It started with Will, an hour later me and a few hours after that Andy. Horrendous vomiting followed by uncontrollable dioreha. I’ll spare you the details but 3 lads, 1 very small bathroom, both ends is all that I need to say.

We were horrifically ill for a good 3 days. Eventually on the Friday we escaped the hotel on a boat trip (organised ourselves) which left from Bodrum and had our last evening eating out for fearof getting ill of the sub standard food. This was obviously quite annoying especially when you’ve payed for all inclusive but at the time we just couldn’t face it.

On arriving back to the UK it was still very clear that we still weren’t better. And even now, some two weeks after, we are still not 100%. The professional athlete amongst us was seen immediately by the club doctor on arrival home in the UK. After some tests it was apparent the illness we had all being suffering from was in fact Salmonella. I spoke to some other people in the hotel a few days after we first got sick and they too had mentioned that they had been ill. During our illness I tried to go to see the doctor, to at least tey to tell him about the illness and see maybe if anyone else was suffering. Unfortunately, like all the staff, the Nurse’s English was very poor, I spoke to a translator on the phone who said that the doctor was on visits around Bodrum. Knowing that the most they could do was provide us with some Dioralite or similar we chose to just stay bed bound and get ourselves better.

Guess What! We’re Complaining!

Since returning home, i’ve read several other complaints about Goldtrail holidays. The most notable being from Peter Gray who stayed at the same hotel roughly the same time as us. You can read his review on his own dedicated blog here. Thanks Peter for the video!

It’s also already been featured on BBC Watchdog! I really should’ve seen this before I went. Although a lot of the complaints feature around it being cheap and dirty, £700 was certainly not cheap!

And as you can see the general gist on the high authority travel review site Trip Advisor isn’t too good either.

So Goldtrail, we want our money back! We would like an apology too and an assurance that you won’t put anyone else through such an awful holiday experience.

We will be writing to ABTA too and keep updating you with progress on here and on Peter’s blog.

More pictures on my Flickr profile here.