Scenic Luxury Cruises and Tours - UK
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And this is before our cruise
And this is before our cruise! I have booked an 11 day Bordeaux Cruise Featuring Raymond Blanc - something of a hero and wine connoisseur, Susy Atkins . The cruise was featured in the Telegraph so attracted to it. First of all -why is it so many companies take my details then feel free to text or email or whatever media they choose and don't allow the customer the ease of similarly communicating. I had the phone, press 1 for this etc but they are not there. So I have yo wait until they manage to start work at 9am tomorrow when I have to use my precious day to phone. To begin; I rang& booked and had to give over information and pay in full. I then received and email with various forms to fill in. After attempting the most onerous - it seemed to be on on-line form but not sure. Lots of data about 2 passengers. It was a completely ridiculous programme eg asking for dates about passport, date of issue, date of expiry. Instead of being able to put in a date the cell brought up a calendar - you had to move forwards or backwards to get to the right month. select the date - 7th, 8th whatever. Then it gave you a date with 2018. Clearly most of thede passport issue/expiry dates will not be 2018 so this then needs manually changing. Then having called my husband in Germany to get passport details I reached the bottom of the page and clicked on 'Next' - perfectly normal when filling in a form. Noooooo - all the fields cleared. Aaaagh!! So I called Germany again and completed it all again. Then I tried various means of getting off the page. I even tried the field the said 'Download Document ' but it didn't. In the end I had to come out and all the fields cleared again. So if they want it filled in they are going to have to send me a paper doc to complete. On top of that I have been sent a Booking Advice - 3 A4 pagesof small print. The terms & conditions - over 5 A4 pages of even smaller type. 2 x 2 pagesPassenger Information \summary - a form to complete containing most of the data requested on the dreaded on line form. Then a medical information form - including 50% of which they already have eg name, address, emergency contact details on the other forms. Also there is a printed day by day itinerary. Clearly to book the excursions early is important. WELL these are terribly presented in the same on line group of documents. It is difficult to see the daily groupings. The operator earlier had said the 'scenic cookery session' was fully booked. I had done my homework and realised this was their own chef doing a demonstration. Imagine my horror to see this is actually the Raymond Blanc session - and frustratingly I can't speak to anyone to find out if my main reason for coming on this cruise - and I can't get on the talk. It seems they are saying on a large river cruise vessel this is limited to 8 people. They don't put that in the advert! I can't even see when the Susy Atkins sessions are So I am spending this evening being completely unhappy. Of course the ts and cs are full of get outs. On the basis of my first 12 hours of Scenic it doesn't bode well. I hope the organisation improves, and the boat works better than their admin ability. I will update this review as I go along.