This review is about BusAbout customer service. This covers my experience with BusAbout in regards to a Croatia Sailing experience. I will walk you through the agonizing and slow process of communicating with them and why you may want to think twice before using this company.
I emailed BusAbout customer service on August 23 in regards to a sailing Croatia trip that left on August 31. I informed them that I was having difficulties making it down to Croatia for the August 31 departure date and asked if they could re-schedule me. As the departure was 8 days away, I figured they would give me a timely response. They did not!
I heard from them on August 26 when they responded that they could not reschedule my departure and that they could not offer me a refund (I did not expect a refund). What got me was that they could not reschedule or change my booking when I could clearly see that they had many unfilled spaces in September. And Miss Kylie (the customer service representative that replied to me) had the gall to ask if I wanted them to cancel my booking even though they would give me no compensation for this or reschedule me; effectively, this would be to free up a slot on that boat so that they could then resell it. What a customer-centric way of thinking…
I promptly replied to them on August 26 asking how it was possibe to not be able to reschedule me when they had many open slots on boats departing in September. It took until August 29 for them to get back to me, two days before my original scheduled departure!!! By this point, I had already purchased an insanely expensive ticket to get to the departure point in Croatia for the August 31 departure date.
In this lovely email, Kylie told me that they were “willing” to change the departure date for me. Thank you for waiting so long to reply you, in my opinion, lazy piece of shit! This is supposed to be a big and well-run organization through which thousands of people travel each year and they couldn’t even help me in a timely manner.
Then, two more customer service reps, Jodie and Daniela, chimed in and told me about available dates that weren’t exactly available and then, when I asked about either an available date or just going on the original departure, they decided to inform me the day before the original departure that they changed my departure date.
Thanks for the heads up! Thanks for the warning! Thanks for the slow and innacurate responses! I’d like to give a big screw you to BusAbout, Kylie, Jodie, and Daniela.
Due to their slow response time, I had to pay just under $500 USD to get to the departure point in Split for the original date, which they then changed on me though I was at that point willing to take the original slot.
As a result of this interaction, and the way it was handled, given the requirement for an expedited response, I will be very hesitant to use BusAbout in the future, including any of their other travel services because, I have seen, that when a traveler is in need of help from them, they will not get it.