Unprofessional, stressful waste of money
We booked Eskapas' Best of Italy and France Tour, and were incredibly disappointed with the service provided.
The Eskapas website indicates "Our groups are mid-size to give you a better experience but also to offer a competitive price", there are reviews indicating folks made new friends with their group, and the tour listed a maximum group size of 40 people.
This does not actually mean their tours are guided, group experiences. You will be handed a PDF of documents and be expected to execute on an itinerary of transit and half day tours filled with people you will never see again. This model only works if the tour company is actually providing accurate information. Instead, the itinerary was wrong (either time or location) on almost every single item.
Tour information provided was inaccurate:
- We were 25 minutes late for a tour because we were given the wrong location and time, and it was only through the kindness of the direct tour operator that we were able to join the tour at all.
- Information for another tour was entirely inaccurate. After speaking with Eskapas, it became clear they were well aware of the inaccuracies but had not bothered to communicate an updated itinerary, despite being asked directly for further information.
- We would have missed two more tours had we not contacted the companies providing the tour directly, which we were only able to do after asking repeatedly for original confirmation documents from the direct tour providers given the frequency of Eskapas failings.
Not a single tour in the itinerary was accurate - each was at a different time, to different places, or departed from a different start location.
Car transfers failed to arrive:
- Drivers were told incorrect pick up times, leaving us waiting until we ultimately found other means of transport to our destinations.
- On one occasion, we were then bombarded with a slew of messages from the driver over an hour after our train had arrived. Despite Eskapas knowing that we had already found our own way to the hotel, they clearly had not bothered to inform the car service that the pickup was no longer necessary.
Attention to detail was nonexistent:
- We arrived at our final hotel only to be told they had no record of our reservation. We finally found the reservation in their system, made for 2026 instead of 2025, and got very lucky as it was not peak season so they could still accommodate us.
After we complained about this stressful and chaotic experience, we asked for a partial refund given it was so unprofessional and different from what was advertised. Eskapas gave us a laughable (2.5%!) refund and claimed that no compensation was required for tours that were "completed", regardless of whether we missed half the tour due to their errors and reluctance to put us in touch with the people they bought all the experiences from.
I cannot underscore enough how much I wish we had just planned our own vacation. Eskapas provided an experience equivalent to an overpriced, under communicative, incompetent travel agent. Something went wrong every single day of our trip, things which were entirely avoidable had Eskapas been competent enough to provide the services they are marketing.
Save your money, save yourself an unquantifiable amount of stress, and book with literally anyone else.