Vacation Express The tour operator granted us a hard to forget departure transfer experience Internet
To whom it may concern,
We have just arrived back home in the US from our trip to Jamaica. In all, Vacation Express provided us with a good experience, up until today´s departure transfer to Montego Bay’s airport from the hotel where we were staying at in Negril.
Regarding the transfer, something happened which made the overall experience a great deal less pleasant that it could have been. First, the SHARED transport for which we paid, that should have picked us up at 10.20AM never showed up –the pre-arranged time the tour-operator’s representative told us the day before. Instead, a PRIVATE transporter appeared close to an hour late yelling our names, which, apparently, had been given to him by some other third party, unknown to everybody else.
The aforementioned third party could not be reached whatsoever, because the call had been received from a private number. Moreover, we did not have any number to call so, considering we were already running late for the departure flight, we decided to go with the guy who, at least, knew: i) our names; ii) that we wanted to go to the airport; and, iii) the pre-arranged pick-up time and that we were already late.
Things started to get a little (more) awkward when the private driver started to rally through the Negril-Montego Bay road doubling the maximum allowed speed –even after passing by an accident in the outskirts of Lucea, with at least two fatal victims within sight.
Interestingly enough, at one point, the driver stopped the car in the middle of nowhere and waited for another car to stop by us at the side of the road. The other car´s driver and ours started chatting in Broken English to finally claim that they were cousins and that we should get in the other car in order to get to the airport since his cousin was also going to the airport to pick up someone else... We tried to ask them for an explanation about how we could have ended up in that situation, but they would not let us know.
We decided that, as the former driver was the one knowing our names, we would stay with him and refused to swap cars, so after arguing a great deal and flirting with some panic attack moments, the original driver finally decided to resume his particular time trial and rally us to the airport in about half the time it should take according to Google and law enforcement agents –at least those in charge of traffic control and signs.
In all, the departure transfer was a very stressful, sketchy, awkward and life-and-death situation which I would not recommend to the worst of my enemies.
We have followed the advice from a representative from the tour-operating company on arrival at the airport and we filed a complaint on arrival at the US, instead of there at Montego Bay, but please, we would like to share this experience so as to spare future customers this type of situation and let them know that we are trying to settle this as peacefully as possible for everyone, as we do not normally tend to do this type of things, but the situation lived today is way worth the effort.