Viator Tours & Attractions

This was my first time using Viator. I usually use Get your Guide which has been awesome. The tour booked through viator was not as advertised. Being on a cruise ship, we had specific timing we needed to follow. The tour was advertised as a guaranteed back to ship time by our last tender time. It was also advertised as starting at 9 am sharp and encouraged those booking to take early tenders to not miss this time or they would have to take the cable cars and meet up with the tour later. The booking listing advertised that they could not wait. I made sure my family of 5 was up at 6 am and we got an early tender. We specifically booked this tour to avoid the cable car lines. When we got off our tender, there was no line for the cable car. But our tour guides made us wait an hour for 70 more people to come who were late. So we sat and waited for an hour y the port doing nothing but worry as the time we were leaving kept getting pushed back. This one hour late start cut into our sightseeing time immensely. We didn’t have long in port and were disappointed the tour did not go on as advertised and we wasted an hour waiting for late people. We were supposed to get an hour at the beach. We barely got 40 minutes at the beach and were expected to swim and order and eat a meal without this time. We were over 30 minutes late to our tender which made this relaxing vacation turn into an anxiety attack. No guarantees that were advertised held up as true. Big disappointment.

So myself and a group of friends are going to Japan in a couple of weeks and I had some reservations I made about 6 months ago, at first it wouldn’t allow me to make reservations for all of us so I reached out to customer support and surprisingly pretty sure it was a actual person! And they help me sort it out not a day later or a delayed response, I sort it out right then in their and I was really glad cause it planning is stressful! Then recently another person just bought her ticket and I had to help them also with reservation but when I check it was supposedly completely book! I was very disheartened but I verified on other sites and noticed that on other sites you can still booked, me wanting to keep everyone on the same reservation reach out to customer support and they submitted a ticket for me( I didn’t even know you can submit a amendment ticket till the person at Viator ask me if I wanted to) long story short I got to add her on our reservations and ugh I’m so glad 😭😭, the quick response and them actually being helpful is amazing which is why I’m actually leaving a review so whoever is in charge of customer service here give them a raise!

We use this site all the time and they are great site to use for your trips and we’ve never have had any problems until now. We pre booked an excursion for 12pm on a Wednesday which meant we needed to cancel by 12pm on Tuesday to get our refund. We had something come up on Wednesday so we weren’t going to make the 12 pm Wednesday, so I tried to change our time to 10am Wednesday, but I never got a confirmation email saying that it went through. I decided to cancel the entire tour at 11:14am on Tuesday because I didn’t want to loose out on $290. I was told I would be refund the $290 in an email but I wasn’t refunded. I called and they told me my attempt to reschedule actually went through and would have needed to cancel by 10am on Tuesday to get my refund per their policy. I asked why I didn’t get and email about the change or why the tour operator didn’t send me a message about the change in time and they said they may have been a glitch in the system. I sent them pics of my email and what the site showed as I canceled showing I would get a full refund with no cancellation fee. They still said they wouldn’t give me a refund per their policy. I think they are great site and I still trust them to book all my excursions, I just will never pay for booking since I now believe no matter what you will not get a refund if you you have to cancel. They definitely value their money over your continued business.