Cheated and looted!. Review on Kesari Tours, Pune

CLARIFICATION: This review is about Kesari Mumbai, near Citylight Cinema, Mahim. It is wrongly posted as Kesari Pune. My apologies for the same.

We decided to go with Kesari to Europe for our honeymoon trip, since we had heard wonderful things about their tour. Little did we know that we were going for a tour that we would remember for all the wrong reasons.We booked their Europe trip, which comprised Switzerland, Paris and London. Kesari had announced big discounts on these tours, so we rushed to Kesari office, waited in their'waiting room' where they had self-congratulatory videos playing in a loop and booked ourselves for this trip. Our troubles started soon afterwards.My current job involves travelling, and I was posted in Chennai for a month. My wife was studying in the same city. We asked Kesari office to advise us on how to get the U.K. and Schengen visa done in Chennai, to save time. My wife and I used to call them almost every day, and always, the response was that they would call us back.

Nobody bothered to do so. On my return to Mumbai, I rushed to get my UK visa done, but due to the delay, it was not possible to get my wife's U.K. Visa. So, we had to cancel the UK leg of our tour. Kesari were unwilling to give us refund. After a lot of arguing, they agreed to pay us back some of the money, a paltry Rs. 15, 000/-(according to Kesari, 2 people can travel from Paris to London, stay in London for 2 days, do sightseeing and return to Mumbai in this princely sum! And incidentally, they had not even booked our Paris to London Eurail train tickets!)Our bad luck had just begun.

On the first day of the tour, I managed to break my leg(fracture) in Switzerland. The tour guide did not attend to me, or appoint someone to attend to me in this emergency, preferring to take the group for shopping. We managed to get through the Switzerland leg with some difficulty. We requested our tour guide to arrange for a wheelchair in Paris, (for which we were willing to pay extra) so that we could complete our tour. He said yes and did not bother to do so. Interestingly, we came to know from tour guide that at that point, there were 4 Kesari tours in Paris itself.

A simple phone call would have solved the problem. As luck would have it, it was a long weekend in Paris, and all chemist(pharmacy) shops were closed, so we could not even get wheelchair on hire. So, we missed out on many places of interest and had to stay back in the hotel room itself. Even in this, Kesari did not offer to pay for our lunch, in fact they told us to take care of the meal ourselves. Our truncated trip ended and we parted ways with our group, when we went to Paris airport and the group left for London. We had to arrange for the taxi and had to pay for the ride from hotel to airport.

The most wonderful part of this tour was the feedback form which they gave us to fill. The ratings available on the form were: Good, very good and Excellent! Obviously, Kesari believes that they cannot do a single thing wrong. This was our first trip abroad and Kesari's careless attitude made it extremely unforgettable.and regrettable.