Travel Agent Review: Cuba One-Week Family Trip, Salsa Lesson, Beaches, Culture & Locals

Request smaller meals at lunchtime and definitely small breakfast on the departure day.  (With 6 AM departure no one ate the large amounts of food that were offered.)

Give tour director more guidance about activities we would like.  Only after returning and talking to the trip planner, did I realize all the requirements for our trip on her part.  Cuba would be one of the most challenging places to organize tours.

Travel Company Comments

Dear Mrs. C, 

We wanted to respond to your review with Zicasso to thank you for your feedback. We appreciate hearing about Lorenzo’s performance in making you feel comfortable, and we are very happy to know that you and your entire family enjoyed the salsa lesson! We had an excellent time with you during the New Year’s party and can’t wait to see the family photos! 

We would also like to address a few of the less than perfect aspects of your trip mentioned in your review in order to strive to improve in every area we can. As you mention at the end of your review, we have a lot of requirements we must meet in order to comply with our government’s regulations in Cuba, and included within those requirements is a minimum of eight hours a day of cultural or educational experiences. We always make every effort we can for those experiences to be both enlightening and fun, but unfortunately we are unable to allow extended relaxation time like too much time at the beach as it would prevent us from meeting that minimum guided time requirement. We were able to offer you two partial days of beach time in the Bay of Pigs area as we included the Flora and Fauna tour in the protected national swamp as well. In this fashion we can always offer our guests some time at the beach, but cannot extend it beyond certain limits. 

We also apologize for the large breakfast so early on your departure day. It is never our intention to waste food, but we do always try to guarantee that our guests will meal substantial enough to ensure they can comfortably make it back home in the event of any delays. We can make an effort in the future to ask our guests how they feel the night before their travel so we can provide the right portion sizes. We will also work to lighten the sizes of the lunch meals, though Cuban restaurants are accustomed to providing large portions as most people on the island are unable to eat out on a frequent basis. This factor, in combination with the lack of safe and sanitary fast food, unfortunately leads to larger and longer lunches than we would prefer. We are always looking for new options however, and hope that we will be able to offer lighter fare more frequently on future tours. 

Thank you again for entrusting us with your lovely families New Year’s vacation! We appreciate all of your feedback as it assists us in better tailoring customized experiences for our guests. We hope to see you and your family again and hope you have an excellent year!