GAP Adventures - experiences?

Hi....

Wow! I wished I had have found this site before I booked my tour with GAP. I used them last year to travel through India, whilst the continent was different the problems were the same. I work in the travel industry & could not believe the disorganisation & "slap dash" attitude of this company.

Here's the history...GAP used to be the "budget arm" of Intrepid which is a highly respected world wide tour provider. They severed ties a couple of years back, no doubt to GAP's practices. Now Intrepid does their own "basix" tours which is what GAP used to provide!

Where to start...they changed the starting hotel twice, no a big deal but when you have paid for extra 2 nights accommodation at this hotel they should advise you & send a new voucher......they didn't. In fact a girl joining our tour who had come straight from finishing a tour of Nepal spent several hours running around to find the wrong hotel by cab & to find out it had changed without them advising her. Thankfully in India cabs are cheap - but elsewhere would have been more of an issue.

Then they advertise the tour visits the abandoned town of Fatehpur Sikri (a highlight of an Indian tour), only to find out that there is no transport to get there & no one ever gets to see it. They also advise is 2 different places you can do a cooking class (optional activity)...sadly they didn't bother to advise their tour leader that this was possible, so in the end he pulled out the lonely planet & made some calls for me & arranged it. Too bad the company doesn't give any support to their staff.

The tour always leaves on a Monday, and they advertise you can visit the Calico Museum in Ahmedebad (another highlight) - guess what - the tour always arrives in Ahmedebad on a Wednesday - the one day of the week the museum is CLOSED!

Whilst on Ahmedebad, they thought we would like to carry our bags/backpacks around this dubious city for 8 hours between the bus arrival & the train departure!! The cloak room at the train station won't hold the backpack style bags we were TOLD to bring because you can't lock them! So in the end our tour leader found the cheapest (and nastiest) hotel in town for us to store our stuff.

The finishing hotel was changed 3 times - again not a huge issue - but it moved from North Goa to South Goa some 65kms away. Problem was my 18 year old nephew was meeting me there and we had specifically booked a hotel for him close to where I was. Which means I had to cut the tour short by two days due to the change in location!!

It is my experience working in the industry that if you are a reliable/reputable/established tour operator you do not change your joining/finishing hotels as often as you change your sheets!!

Thankfully I got a response to my concerns from GAP with a voucher off my next tour....a tour needless to say I will never take!!!!

That all said....we had the BEST tour leader who tried very very very hard to make up for the lack of planning/support on GAP's part.

Take the advice from someone in the Industry (airline employee not travel agent) stick with either Intrepid or Geckos - no scary surprises

Enjoy

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Having experienced GAP in India, I would recommend looking at other tour companies for a trip to Machu Picchu. I went with General Tours and was extremely pleased with that experience. Travel in Peru can get "interesting" at times, and my experience with GAP pretty much says they're not capable of handling it. My recommendations are for either General Tours or Overseas Adventure Travel. Both are small group oriented and have an excellent track record in Peru. Reply to this

If not Gap, who would you recimmend ten? I'm going to Argentina,Chile than Bolivia and Peru.Will be travelling on my on in though the first two countried bot would like to take an organized trip in Bolivia and Peru.I went to rTailfinders in Dublin where they actually recommended Gap.But having read all these comments i'm having serious doubts now..Any advice?
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If you want to be volunteer in south america, check this list
www.unesco.org/ccivs

you will find a directory of real voluntary organization and a lot of them doesn't ask any "profit" fees to the people coming to help them Reply to this

Wow that is a long comment about Gap adventure they must or really annoyed you. I have just booked 3 tours 1 with Gap and 2 with Intrepid. The one I booked with Gap is to South America as the women at STA travel said Gap were better at South America and Intrepid were better with Thailand. I booked the guaranteed trip so hopefully it should be ok. I am doing the Santiago to Lima tour. Has any one else done this tour. It starts in chilli goes up to Bolivia then Peru Reply to this

I symphatize fully with you for it happened to me last year in Hoi An.

Adding to my pain was the reaction of the Manager there, acting as if he didn't understood what I was talking about.
Killing me finally was their phone call few days later, asking me to settle the bill...that I had pre-paid through a travel agency in Saigon.

I wish I could remember the name, but thank God, I took them out of my memory.
(they own three hotels around town, with one "only-wood-and-old" on one of the main arteries).

Mainly a managerial problem, I guess.

Cheers, charles Reply to this

Thailand island hopping with GAP-

the bed bugs only where only one thing.

We did not have a hot shower for 4 days and than went to on the sleeper train back to Bangkok and adjacent were supposed to catch our flight back. How would any traveller feel on the plane back home without having had a proper warm shower for 5 days?

For 2 days we slept in a tent on a hard mat where sleeping was not really possible. The floor was so hard that my hips hurt.
The cold shower we could use during certain ours of the day only was about 3 inches away from the Thai toilet bowl so you literally where taking a shower above the toilet.

The so called long tail boat that we used was so old that it was quite dangerous to us it. The leader in the boat was so rusty that one tread broke off while someone of the group was just getting onto the boat. I badly scratched my back an a rusty metal rod that my fellow traveller would ask me quite shocked about what had happened to me when they saw my bruise.

The group was quite nice and we had fun nevertheless. The trip was not that cheap and everything nice in the south was additional to the costs. We booked a nice boat trip that was very nice and expensive and I would have loved to spend 20$ extra per night and upgrade to a clean hotel and not to bring back bed bugs!

I can imagine that it is a management problem but if GAP offers too many trips and cannot keep track their services the travelers should not have to suffer!

Cheers Sunny


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@janet2801: "Here's the history...GAP used to be the "budget arm" of Intrepid which is a highly respected world wide tour provider. They severed ties a couple of years back, no doubt to GAP's practices. Now Intrepid does their own "basix" tours which is what GAP used to provide!"

umm.... no. Not even close as a matter of fact.

Here's the history. Intrepid started before G.A.P., stared by Darryl Wade and Geoff Manchester in Australia. G.A.P started shortly after by Bruce Poon Tip in Toronto ( after he had went on an Intrepid trip and basically stole their business model ). Being similar companies they did have a verbal agreement. Intrepid operated in Asia while G.A.P operated in South America. The two never operated in the others regions.

Even though there was a verbal contract, and split regions, the two companies were definitely in competition. Soon there was a need for expansion for each company however there was the verbal contract. Intrepid went into South America. Ties were split immediately. The next day GAP hired Intrepids Asia tour leader and brought with him all the other Asia Intrepid guides. So, in a day GAP had their Asia itinerary.

There ya go.

G.A.P will do anything to get a sale. Their prices look low ( until you factor in their local payment ) because they want as many passengers as possible. Higher volume and lower costs still equals profit.

Intrepid is by far the better operated company in my personal opinion.


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GAP Adventures "Peru on a shoestring"
Anyone have feedback on this trip. Any recommendations?
Thanks,
Dad.
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I went on 3 trips with Intrepid last year and will do another in August 2009. The guides were fantastic and so were the trips and far better than GAP. I went on one trip 3 years ago with GAP which had a guide and 2 in training and they were terrible. The trip was OK but everyone got stuff stolen from them and when we exchanged money were cheated and the guide just said they always do don't argue. In a recent forum on the Gap site several people had stuff stolen on their trip. When I tried to contact someone on one of the future trips concerning a positive matter the moderator blocked it. I too would rather pay a little more and go on a well organized Intrepid trip and have a great time. Reply to this