NOT a luxury trip, NOT luxury customer service, NOT worth the money – find someone else or do it yourself!!!

My wife and I booked a trip to South America (Peru / Chile) with Black Tomato from December 20th 2021 – January 9th 2022. Unfortunately my wife came down with COVID for the Chile part of our trip which we are not blaming on Black Tomato – that was out of their control. What we are reviewing below is the quality of the Peru trip, value of the trip, quality of customer service, and how they handled our situation on the ground. We booked our trip with Tom, Grace and Oliver was communicating with us at the end. We have not heard from Tom since we have made these comments to the Black Tomato team. I want to make this clear – this would have been a 3 star if not for the way the team has handled our issues after finishing our trip. The team is not taking accountability and blaming the customer (my wife and I). Definitely not representative of a luxury service. However, the main issues with this agency is the fact that they organise cookie cutter trips at an insane markup without clarifying, asking or understanding what their customer wants. Main overarching issues: – Lack of understanding what we really wanted with our trip – No transparency with costs. Not only do they not provide an itemised invoice for your trip, they will not check on where you are willing to spend your money. The team did not double check what type of rooms we would want, but just charged us blindly for the most expensive rooms. – Just lack of a luxury experience when we were on the ground vs what we paid for. Specific examples: – We were super clear that we didn’t want guides – yet we got a guide everywhere we went. This completely changed the tone of our trip. Yes it’s nice to not have to think about transport but the guides don’t need to be there with us 24/7. For example – our guide sat with us at lunch, would not stop talking on our romantic hikes. We have no issue with the guide, what we were angry about was that we communicated that we were independent travellers to the Black Tomato team and they STILL put us with one without double checking which changed the entire feel of our trip. Just because it worked for other clients, doesn’t mean it will for us. They just did not listen. – A breakdown of all the prices is a non-negotiable in this day in age. We trusted Black Tomato to show us a general breakdown of hotels vs activities and we ended up getting a trip we just didn’t want because of possible extra charges (more expensive rooms, paying for the guides etc). We never asked for the fanciest rooms and they ended up booking rooms that were $3,000 more expensive than the rooms we could have gotten. – Stress of having to tip the guides —> Because there was a guide on the ground with us, we had to stress about tipping them. We are always super generous but the Black Tomato team should have communicated this to us before our trip OR included petty cash in our overall price. Again lack of communication before the trip. – We communicated we do not like fancy restaurants with tiny courses at the very beginning and without asking they booked us the most fancy restaurants in Lima (probably because their other clients ask for this). Again – just because it worked for others, doesn’t mean it will for us. If we didn’t double check our restaurants we would have been stuck with those reservations.The team clearly did not listen to us and if we didn’t check with them beforehand, we would’ve had these fancy restaurants books. Again, example of just not knowing their client. – Wait time for travel —> Machu Pichu to Cusco was such an unorganized day. Too many transport transitions and too much waiting. If this is the only way then at least brief us beforehand. Also, if this is such a luxurious trip – then they should have made it super easy for us to get from point A to point B. – We made it clear we don’t like touristy stuff. Why is our one day in Cusco supposed to be with a guide viewing cathedral – we ended up cancelling the guide in Cusco the day of which stressed us out. – The team planned to have us n quarantine for New Year’s Eve (when we planned to be in Santiago)? There was no thought that went into this planning. Although we didn’t make it to Chile – who would think this was a good idea? Again DO NOT TRUST THEM to give you the best itinerary – if you use them YOU should be making EVERY decision and just tell them what to do but then again, what is the point of a luxury travel agency if you have to do that? – Without giving us good options on the ground once we had COVID – we ended up getting stuck in Peru paying for a US$400 / night quarantine room. They did not give us good options or help us as we were navigating the COVID situation in Lima. We ended up figuring this out on our own after we got quarantined during New Years. Again, us getting COVID was not the issue – it was the way they handled it. If we did not use Black Tomato we would have had a better experience.