Canterbury Travel Reviews 

Really friendly and showed same genuine excitement as us. Exuded confidence and information.

Excellent telephone service from Stephen , extremely helpful - thank you 😊

Travel adviser was helpful courteous and very professional

For such a huge company its very difficult to find reviews on an site. I worked at Canterbury Travel Christmas 2021. Before I went out I found a couple of pretty damaging reviews but they've now disappeared. If anyone see's this and a perspective worker please don't go. (Actually from the perspective of anyone please don't go). It's terrible pay and they treat people so badly. They barely feed you, your basically on rations and it's even worse when the customers leave for the season. I was on a resort that you had to drive to dinner because it's so cold and they just wouldn't pick us up. They'd 'forget' everyday. But they picked up who they liked. It's a very 'all about who you know' type of deal and they even base the end of year bonus on this. (But I didn't want to get friendly with the managers because they are so creepy, they get locked away most of the year and forget out to function appropriately to female staff). I had a bonus significantly less than people who were doing less work than me. It's just awful and so many customers don't enjoy their time, there's so many complains you have to deal with. This will probably get deleted but hopefully at least I save one poor soul from getting a job with this company.

We paid for a 3 day break with Canterbury Travel to Lapland (the Majestic Lapland package), if you're planning on booking a Lapland trip with Canterbury travels I'd strongly recommend you read the below, as the marketing material we had read prior to the trip did not prepare us for it!

Keep in mind that this is a 3 day package coach holiday and the whole "holiday" is based around a tightly run schedule with a group of approx. 50 people/20 families, who you'll be with for the whole 2-3 days. I say this because it was a surprise to us and a lot of families on the tour, who were understandably expecting something a little more bespoke, considering the huge amount of money they had forked out to Canterbury Travel. There were many frustrating situations over the three days, but below are the main ones. I set this out to help manage your expectations, so hopefully your experience will not be as disappointing or maybe you're able to find a travel company other than Canterbury Travel that offers an experience which doesn't feel like you're on a production line.

1) Accommodation
The accommodation we were allocated by Canterbury Travel was really poor. The bathroom was akin to something you’d see in cheap student accommodation. There were random bits of furniture/objects that had not been tidied away. Some of the draws had books/magazines in and there was hardly any wardrobe space to hang clothes.

To sum up, it was the sort of accommodation you would expect if you were backpacking and paying $50 a night . We were assigned better accommodation on the second night, which was more in line with what I would expect, however it was obviously irritating and stressful that we had to unpack and pack twice. Speaking to other parents on the tour there seemed to be a huge difference in the quality of accommodation, despite paying the same price. When you’re paying this sort of money it's not reasonable to have “luck of the draw” in terms of the accommodation quality.

2) Food
The food was very basic and no different to school dinners. I was assured that the restaurant we had been assigned was very good and they had never received negative feedback, which I find hard to believe. Again not what you expect when your paying this sort of money. As a result of the bad food, we paid to eat at a different restaurant for the remaining nights and had breakfast in our cabin!

3) The pace of the tour and the activities
Our guide, was amazing and did a great job at managing an incredibly challenging schedule. The Huskies, reindeer, meeting santa and story time at the Elf house were great and the kids enjoyed these activities. I have two complaints around the activities:
1) There was far too much packed into day 1. We started at 8:50am on day 1 (6:50 am GMT) and finished at 5:30. We didn’t have lunch until 2pm so we had cold, hungry kids, who were absolutely exhausted by the end of it. The second day still had a really early start (08:30/06:30 GMT) but finished at 2:30.
2) A number of the activities felt like we were just playing for time - in a holding pattern – snowball fight and tag in a car park? The skidooing was also really disappointing, literally got to do one figure of 8, which lasted 1 minute, then back on the coach. The last two activities of Day 2 were also disappointing/pointless – another game of tag and pathetic catapults and then tobogganing down a tiny slope (the paths in the resort were better), with a ditch either side (making it slightly dangerous), queuing for 15 mins and managed by a really grumpy "elf".

Overall, given the money we had spent, the activities did not feel up to standard. In addition it felt like Canterbury Travels had overbooked/had far too many coach groups to manage and as a result everyone suffered by having the activities unevenly spread over the two days and not in a logical order. This was typified when we were given the final clue to find santa, after we had met santa!