This was our 1st time with Titan and we were looking forward to the holiday but after a smooth pick up & transfer to Heathrow, things deteriorated; arriving in Mumbai after a night flight, the hotel rooms were not available until 2pm & Reception did not have enough seating to accommodate us so it was a long tired wait with our luggage. Nothing in the holiday was as described in the brochure- ‘optional excursions’ weren’t offered & wording like “ After a short flight we’ll drive to Pench National Park’ meant, in reality, a 2am wake-up call for a 6am flight to Pench followed by a 2 & 1/2 hr coach journey. Our guide had to be cajoled into providing some information about our itinerary & the places we were visiting as he really didn't seem interested. Every journey time was at least 2 hrs longer than stated in the brochure leading to long gruelling days on an old coach as the state of the roads was poor.
Many of the guides on the tiger safari drives were inexperienced & most didn’t have many words of English. Although some tried hard to describe the wildlife, some were only interested in collecting their tip. In one park, our mobile phones were taken from us ‘for safety’, as an Indian tourist had fallen out of a jeep taking a selfie, but bizarrely in this park, despite toilets being available at the park entrance, the guides instructed everyone to use the bush at a breakfast stop. For the men this meant going into the forest unaccompanied & the women were all instructed to go behind a rough screen made of brush wood in full view of everyone. The ground was littered with tissue and these conditions were not hygienic for either customers or the animals who came after us.
On the last day, the brochure said we would reach our hotel by early evening after the 2 previous full days by coach. We arrived at 10pm after a 5hr coach journey followed by 6 hours on a train & we had not eaten dinner. We then had a 6am wake-up before our 8-hour flight. We were exhausted at the end of the holiday and only had a good view of a tiger in the last half hour of the penultimate of 9x 4 hour forest safaris.
The standard of food was poor: with a packed lunch or breakfast nearly every day with exactly the same meal eaten either in a coach or on the bonnet of a car. The generally low standard of accommodation, travel, food and quality of guide, & the misleading brochure descriptions mean we would never use Titan again. We gave Titan a chance to address our concerns on our return but did not feel that they took our concerns seriously.
