BEWARE of Vantage Travel!

Our trip was entitled SPLENDORS OF THE ITALIAN LAKES AND SWISS ALPS; it was listed as a SMALL GROUP (10-24 people) land tour.What follows is a letter I sent to Henry Lewis, CEO of Vantage Travel, upon our return. We will Never trust our travel to Vantage again!   <We have just returned from the September 10 departure of your SMALL GROUP land trip: Splendor of the Italian Lakes and Swiss Alps. The itinerary was wonderful, we had an absolutely over-the-top excellent Tour Director in Tomislav Bukovsek, and a good time was had by all. Due to the excellence of our Tour Director, we learned a lot about Northern Italy. We had traveled with you only once previously: two years ago on the Douro River Cruise. We were, at the time, impressed by Vantage, and were interested in taking more of your trips. Over the past 15 years, we have visited seven continents, booking most of them through the small group travel of OAT and Odysseys Unlimited. Our Antarctica trip was with Lindblad.So it was very nice to come upon the unique itinerary of your Splendors trip, which included not one locale that we had visited previously. We had been so looking forward to it! The trip itself was great, the itineray, tour director, pacing, hotels, all top drawer. So imagine our dismay when we discovered we were two of TWENTY-SEVEN people on a trip that promises a limit of TWENTY-FOUR!!! In all our years of small group travel, this has NEVER happened! A deal is a deal; a promise is a promise! How greedy can you be??? It also happens that some of the people in the LARGE group that overwhelmed our trip, and whose $$ you could just NOT turn away, were very needy! They were not travel-savvy; barely could cross the street on their own. This was all left to our poor trip leader to deal with. Some of them were very nice people, but frankly, I am amazed that SOME of those people can cross the street on their own in Williamsburg Village! Frankly, you owe all of us a rebate. A promise is a promise; you broke yours. We had no choice but to live with the consequences. Vantage, you have seen the last of us and our $$!>