I couldn’t recommend Bravo Indochina
I couldn’t recommend Bravo Indochina as a tour company. I should have realised that this operator would be problematic before I booked our 12day Essential Cambodia & Vietnam tour. The tour itinerary set out in the listing on Tourradar started in Phnom Pehn and involved four flights during the tour: Phnom Pehn to Siam Reap, Seam Reap to Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang, and Hue to Hanoi. The listing stated “domestic flights included” and the implication was that this referred to the four flights during the tour. But, as technically the flight during the tour from Siam Reap to Ho Chi Minh City crossed an international border I messaged for peace of mind that all four flights were included and received a reply that I would need to book and pay for that flight as only the other three were included. Not only did the listing not make that clear, but it was a very odd way to set up the tour, given this flight was in the middle of the tour and needed to fit in with all the other elements of tour. (I should have stopped there, but my friend and I went ahead with booking the tour and made our own bookings for the Siam Reap to Ho Chi Minh flight in the middle of the tour.) That was just the start of the problems. According to the tour information on Tourradar we were supposed to receive our detailed tour itinerary two weeks before departure. After repeated chasing Bravo Indochina issued something about 10 days before the start of our tour, but it contained contradictory information about the flights during the tour and on querying this Bravo Indochina advised that they hadn’t, and wouldn’t be, booking any of the other three flights forming part of the tour. They didn’t respond when I sent a copy of the original tour listing stating “domestic flights included” and my exchange with them prior to booking when they had confirmed that the three flights were included in the tour price. Also, it was at this point we discovered that the phone number Bravo Indochina gave on their website didn’t work and it was only possible to contact them either through the Tourradar messaging system or by email – and they were very selective about whether they replied to a particular message, and which issues raised they chose to respond on. It took a protracted process of getting Tourradar’s Customer Service and Business teams involved to get Bravo Indochina to eventually agree to book the three flights for us and a revised itinerary was only issued a day before I left the UK. A number of other issues we raised with the itinerary were just ignored (for instance a sunset dinner cruise on the Mekong at Phnom Pehn included in both the original tour listing on Tourradar at the time of booking and the current listing at the time our tour started wasn’t in our itinerary and wasn’t provided despite us raising this in commenting on both the itinerary issued 10 days ahead and the revised itinerary issued the day before I departed from UK. Also, during the tour there were repeated last minute changes to the details listed in our itinerary, including changing hotel, changing flight, and changing tour timings, with no advance notice of most changes. This was unsettling and led to time wasted. For instance, our itinerary gave 11:30 as the time for our tour of Hanoi, but only after emailing at noon when no one had turned up at our hotel were we told our tour wouldn’t start until 13:30 (and actually we didn’t end up leaving the hotel until after 14:00.) All the time we had to proactively email to seek confirmation of the details stated in the itinerary and even then we still experienced some subsequent changes, for example despite a message the night before confirming the name of the hotel in Hue, we were dropped off at a different hotel because it was changed on the day. The actual hotel stays and day tours forming the whole tour mostly met expectations set by the tour listing. (The exceptions being the missing sunset dinner cruise in Phnom Pehn and transport problems on the city tour in Hanoi – after being dropped off at each sight with the tour guide there were lengthy delays in picking us up to take us on to the next sight, such that we ended up walking back to the hotel on our own after waiting for over half and hour and being told by the guide that it would be a further 40 mins to wait for the car.) Between the time we booked and when we took the tour, there were some changes to day tours in the Tourradar listing, but the changes roughly balanced out. (For completeness, on again raising the omission of the sunset dinner cruise in Phnom Pehn through Tourradar after the tour I did receive money back equivalent to its value.)
February 9, 2023
Unprompted review