Dear Readers, I wanted to respond to the negative review written by TravelBella. I am the Managing Director of the company, Anastasia's Africa.\r
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We do remember the planning we did for her trip. Her accounting is full of many inaccuracies. We first spoke to her on April 26, 2012. We did several conference calls with Lulu and her husband, as we do with all our clients to get to know their tastes and passions so that we can design a unique and innovative trip individualized for them. We worked for close to a month with no renumeration or request for deposit. We modified the itinerary over and over, and answered over 20 emails with questions and clarifications, and I was just reviewing the file and see that even in the 5th proposal we still hadn't asked for a deposit.\r
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It was only later so that we wouldn't lose the hard-to-attain gorilla permits that we asked her for a deposit, finally on May 23, 2012. How many companies do this much custom design work without any money down? \r
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Finally, when she said she would book the itinerary with us as soon as it was confirmed - we went ahead confirmed it with all the hotels and lodges -- and she then took our itinerary to another company and started to bid us against one another. Now that we had assisted her with understanding the destination and given her detailed information about the diving spots in Tanzania, different camps, gorilla trekking, and were holding gorilla permits for them. She jumped at the cheaper priced option and didn't even give us a chance to match the itinerary. She took offense when we told her that we were upset that she went ahead and booked with the other company after all the work we had done We understand going for a lesser priced option,but not allowing us a chance at it was upsetting. Our whole team including our staff in Tanzania and Rwanda put in so much work and were very disappointed. But it happens. We did advise the lost client that it is unfortunate, but due to situations such as this we would need to look at changing our more lenient deposit policy. She was unhappy that we told her that and said that her honor had been assuaged. She certainly changed the facts. \r
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Best regards,\r
Karin Jones, ctc, mba\r
Managing Director\r
Anastasia's Africa
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