Letter of Complaint to Tour Agent...

I have decided to post up our email to the irresponsible tour agent called Sedunia Travel in which cost us alot of inconvenience during our trip to Dubai. If you guys have read my Dubai experience on earlier post, you will know what I mean.

From the first day of arrival in which we got the shocked of our life of being sent to a hotel that looks like our 2 star "Bukit Bintang" prostitute hotel to the local tour operator who never did contact/update us on our half day tour & cruise!

We spent hours and days to contact the local tour agent (which was arranged by Sedunia) to let them know our changed of venue from the prostitute hotel to Laura's uncle condominium ....and yet his line could not get through. Needless to say more...this was our letter when we touched down to Malaysia!!

OUR EMAIL TO SEDUNIA TRAVEL:

Emmy, we are very disappointed with the arrangement in accommodation and city tour.

Please see the below comments and i want an explanation from your management.

• The hotel you booked was located in the red light street and it's very inappropriate for 2 ladies to put up in this Fortune Hotel in Al Rigga Road.

• The hotel service was very rude and unpleasant, they want to keep our passports til the following dayand we see no good reasons for the keepsake. I've traveled other countries before and i've never encountered hotel staff to keep passport.

We need passports to move around. What if we were caught up and we have no documents (like passport) to present? We have to insist our passports by slight argument and made us wait at the lobby area for 20-25 minutes. We had some much qualms about taking our passport and we have strange treatment from the people at the lobby.

• There were no drinking water provided in the hotel room, we ended up paying DHR10.00 for a bottle of drinking water.

• We have to check-out at 9pm-9.30pm ( Dubai time) & it's 1am Malaysian time to look for somewhere else to stay.

• City tour was not arranged well and there were no one called us about our tour in advance. We have to call you from Dubai to make sure. No effort from your agent and your goodself. Your representative agent only called on the 26/02/08 and gave us only 1 hour to prepare ourselves.

They are supposed to take us to spice market but ended up did not go due to the driver was in a rush to fetch some tourist to desert safari. The driver was not designatedfor taking us for city tour. We practically stop in few places and photo stop in the car, except for Jumeirah beach & museum. The driver was really in a rush to pick other tourist to go their meet point for desert safari.

Tasha and me are very unhappy with entire tour including the accommodation and other arrangements. We are expecting an explanation and compensation for our traveling expenses.

We hope understand that we have to face so many difficulties during our trip in Dubai.

cheers

Laura & Tasha

A REPLY EMAIL FROM SEDUNIA TRAVEL:
Dear Laura/Tasha,

The hotel is a 3 star tourist class hotel and is not located in a Red light district area. It is the general practice of some hotels to request for the safe keeping of passports whilst others just require an imprint of the credit card. We had lodged a complaint to the hotel via our operator regarding the purported rudeness of the staff.

For your information reconfirmation of the city tour & other transfers were not necessary as we have already made all the necessary arrangements with our tour operators for pick up in the arranged hotel. But as in your case you changed your hotel and only on the 26th Feb we know about it and we had a challenging task to inform our operator on time to change the pickup point.

Nevertheless as soon as they were open the next day we immediately informed our operator the change of hotel and the new pick up point at Escape Tower.As you are aware there is a time difference of 4 hours between Kuala Lumpur & Dubai.

The emergency contact number was not reachable as the designated driver had meet an accident & had been hospitalized therefore our operator had to arrange another driver with another number which we apologise was not communicated you as the change was done at the very last minute.

With regards of the flight date change Emmy had checked and confirmed there were be no penalty if you extended the date of your return flight to the 29th Feb. In addition she advised it was better for you to call Gulf Air office in Dubai to make the changes as at that time you were not able to make a decision on the extended date.

We did not make any changes at all.

I am grateful for your business and hope you will accept my apology for this incident.

It is unfortunate, but occasionally delay of responding and communication happen despite how careful or well trained the personnel are.

(PLease note the letter written in which he did not apologize and still insisted his staff was careful and well-trained....I could laugh!!)

We will take the necessary steps to ensure that such incident do not happen.

Thanks for bringing the situation to my attention and for being so patient.

Best regards.

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