Good holiday badly spoilt by dreadful organisation

<p>My wife and I booked a cruise with Imagine Cruising starting the 10th January 2017 and ending the 9th February. We took the Queen Mary 2 from Southampton to Cape Town, then spent 5 nights at the Table Bay Hotel in Cape Town, then flew to Victoria Falls for 5 nights in a high class Safari Lodge followed by 2 nights on the Zambezi Queen on the Chobe river between Botswana and Namibia.</p> <p> </p> <p>Each component was wonderful, but the organisation between each leg (the only bit organised by Imagine Cruising) was appaling. In summary:-</p> <p>- We never received the final documentation, although Imagine Cruising told us it was sent out. Very odd as we receive all their other documents and endless publicity without problem.</p> <p>- They initially gave us the wrong Cunard booking code so that I had problems accessing my booking with Cunard.</p> <p>- They truncated my wife’s name, despite my making two phone calls prior to departure querying this, and receiving assurances that everything had been corrected. Well it had not.</p> <p>- When we came to take our flight in Cape Town my wife was refused boarding because her name on the eticket had been truncated. We had to pay on the spot over Rand 10,000 to repurchase the tickets my wife already had, and nearly missed the plane. There was no Imagine staff member there to help.</p> <p>- When we arrived in Zimbabwe I spent much of a day expensively on my mobile trying to sort out my wife’s return air tickets, where they had apparently made the same mistake with her name. One email said they the new tickets were being forwarded to me (impossible for them to arrive in time) and giving me a phone number of their office to call. Even this phone number was incorrect – I discovered eventually there was one digit wrong. I did eventually sort it out but we lost the opportunity to go out that day and were very stressed out by the time the evening came. There was no representative of Imagine in our hotel.</p> <p>- Despite the high cost of the trip and the emphasis that this was a luxury holiday, and despite what their own literature promised, Imagine representatives were almost invisible on the ground. There were two ladies at Table Bay Hotel representing Imagine; but they were on the 1st floor with no sign saying so and thus not found by us at the time of check-in. They did not help when many bags were lost. They did nothing when the hotel stored our suitcases outside in the pouring rain. They did not help with the chaotic check-in. They did not book tours. They could not even give me the address, telephone number, or email of Imagine Cruising. The only thing they did in 5 days was to put up on a whiteboard the time of our coach departure saying when the coach was going to leave – and this was removed the day before our departure.</p> <p>- We received no help with our baggage, despite the fact that this was meant to be a luxurious holiday, and the fact that everyone had quite a lot of luggage because we had been on the Queen Mary 2. For example, we had to drag all our luggage across the dirt when we were force to change coaches between Zimbabwe and Namibia. Not acceptable.</p> <p>When we arrived back in the UK we were reimbursed by Imagine for the cost of the extra air tickets and my large mobile bill incurred in Zimbabwe. But all they offered us for the stress and problems that they had caused was a £200 voucher against my next Imagine holiday. This was extremely cynical as they knew I would never travel Imagine Cruising again.</p> <p>So I advise all of you to avoid Imagine Cruising – their organisation is just not good enough and their customer care highly inadequate.</p>