Review: Luxury Peru Tour, Lima, Ica Dune Buggying, Nazca Lines Tour, Machu Picchu

I will divide it into the process of planning the trip, and the trip itself.

When planning the trip, they were very responsive and open to making adjustments.  They were easily reached via phone or email, which was much appreciated.  They were always polite no matter how many adjustments we made and they were forthcoming with suggestions.  The one negative was that they didn’t always send me the documents I needed without asking.  As our trip got closer, I had to contact them for our flight information, status report, and final itinerary, when they were supposed to send them to me at a determined date without my asking. However, they got me these items within a day of my asking for them. 

Once in Peru, we loved all of our tour guides and tours.  I have nothing but good things to say for all but one of the tours and tour guides.  When we landed in Peru, we had flown first class so we were first out of customs (they had our flight info so knew this).  We waited an hour for someone to pick us up.  We called the Lima contact number and she told us the person was in a car accident and to go right to the hotel, but when we got there, he was there and denied being in an accident, saying that he had gone to the airport 45 minutes after our plane landed to allow us time to go through customs.  We never saw him at the airport despite walking through the area where the pickups were multiple times.  However, he was polite, he apologized, and all was well.  Other than that, all of our rides, tours, guides, etc. were seamless and the tour guides were friendly and knowledgeable.  One in particular spent a lot of extra time with us helping my husband find something he wanted in Peru.

The one somewhat negative tour was the Nazca Lines tour.  We were supposed to be picked up at 5am, but the Lima contact called at 10pm and told us they would be getting us at 2:45 instead due to weather.  She said the bus left at 3, so be ready on time.  Well, we waited until 2:55 for our pickup, which isn’t a huge deal except that we were frantic we would miss the bus.  However, it turned out that the bus wasn’t scheduled to leave until 3:30.  Once we got to Ica, we were told there were still issues with the weather so we were taken to a resort, given a tour, and went dune-buggying.  However, my husband and I were the only ones who hadn’t pre-paid for the dune buggying, which made us wonder if there weren’t in fact weather problems, but that we were somehow put on a different tour.  Regardless, we had a great time on the buggy and then took our flight over Nazca.  We were supposed to go to lunch right after (it was 1pm by this time) according to the itinerary, but some people wanted to go dune-buggying again, so we went back to the resort and waited, starving, for an hour for them.  We finally ate lunch around 2:30 and we got back to Lima two hours late. 

Other than those two negative experiences, as I said, we enjoyed everything else and felt that it all went quite smoothly overall.  We expected to have some snafus when traveling internationally, so the changes were not a huge deal.  Overall, I would recommend working with this agency, but they may want to review their Nazca Tour.  

Travel Company's Comments

#1. About traveler's comments on arrival assistance:

Would like to point out that the person in question has been reprimanded and is not working in our staff anymore. Our company values are based in honesty and punctuality. We appreciate the customer´s feedback and regret they had a bad welcome.

#2. About traveler's comments on the Full Day tour to Ica and Nazca Overflight:

This program was offered to the clients in order to be within their budget and was done on a Shared Service basis (i.e., group tours), which has the risk of changes during the service according to the group’s wishes, pace, etc. We agree that punctuality should not have been affected and the guide of the group should balance the wishes of different tourists in the group.  We have sent a report to the local supplier and we trust they are taking corrective measures. From our side, we always prefer to propose service on private basis (e.g., private transfers, private guided tours, etc.) to clients, but it is not always possible due to clients' budget considerations.