Dear Erick_P
Thank you for your feedback.
Since this is our first bad review for this tour, we will address each one of your concerns one by one, we’ve thousands of people happy with this tour, but if it was such a bad experience to you, we respect your opinion.
You are correct, we were an hour late to pick you up and we deeply apologize for our mistake, it was the first time that this situation happened to us in 11 years. Unfortunately, when we arrived at your hotel at your pickup time you were not there, but there was another couple, we called for your name, and the gentlemen from the other couple said that he was you… We actually repeated your name to confirm that it was you indeed, and he answered yes again, then we asked if he was going to the Arenal Volcano Full-Day Combo Tour with Go Tours and he replied yes, therefore, we told them to hop on the van because we had already confirmed the information twice and they said yes both times. Unfortunately, we realized that it was not you 30 minutes later when you called us from your hotel, again, we truly apologize for this mistake.
As to the coffee tour, please note that we advertise it as a “briefing about coffee in Costa Rica”, we apologize if you were expecting something else. Your guide showed you the coffee trees and the coffee beans; and told you how we pick it and harvest it in Costa Rica, that’s what the tour includes as it is stated on the description of it. Then, he took you to the shop and invited you to buy some of the coffee there, because this plantation won the award of having the best coffee in the world in 2001 and 2002! Therefore, we feel that it is our responsibility to ask our customers if they want to buy such good coffee as a treat for their vacation, but it is not mandatory to buy it if you don’t want it.
In regards to the fresh picked-strawberry tasting, please note that this is not included in your tour, this was an extra stop that your guide did as an added value (he felt bad about the whole situation at the beginning of the tour, and wanted to give you the best possible experience). It was a simple stop where you can taste strawberries for free, which we do not see it as a bad thing at all (buying extra strawberries was optional).
As to your comment about skipping the volcano tour because it was cloudy, we are going to take the opportunity to ask future participants to please read the description, because this excursion does not include a volcano tour of any sort. The description clearly states that we go to the Arenal Volcano area and that the excursion includes visiting a coffee plantation observing waterfalls, doing zip lining, rappelling, hot springs, etc., but it does not say anywhere that we do a volcano tour on this excursion. Probably you misunderstood the guide and he was just mentioning that the volcano was cloudy and that pictures could not be taken due to this.
In regards to the indigenous tribe presentation included after the zip lining, we do not understand why you put natives in quotes (“natives”), because the people who did this presentation for you are real members of the Maleku tribe, which is an indigenous reservation about 30 minutes away from the place where you enjoyed the presentation. As you had mentioned, they have traditional masks, instruments and other stuff that is handmade in their reservation, and they have it available for purchase to help other people back in the reserve. This is something very normal on tours, and this is a good cause because they are creating an opportunity to sell their handmade art to help their tribe. We do not understand why you are taking all of this stuff as an attack to your wallet, you simply have to enjoy the places where you stopped during the tour, but if you do not want to buy anything, you simply don’t buy it.
In regards to the food, we are glad you liked the lunch. We apologize for the dinner and appreciate your feedback, we will take this into consideration to improve our dinner choices.
To finalize our response, we are glad to know you liked certain things, like the zip lining, the lunch, and the hot springs, but we do not think we deserve the rating you gave us, because this tour for itself is beautiful, you did not mention in your comments the nice waterfalls you visited, the animal viewing points where you observed lots of wildlife of Costa Rica, and the beautiful landscapes that are observed during this tour. This is just our perception, from the feedback we have received from thousands of previous customers, we entirely respect your opinion, but we do not share that the rating provided is fare, despite the mistakes we made in the morning and the issue you had with the dinner. We wish that you have not concentrated so much on money, because you mentioned money issues a few times during your comments. Please note that the people at these places are not trying to get in your pockets, we just wanted to inform you that those things were available in case that you wanted to purchase them, like the coffee, strawberries, or the handmade indigenous stuffs, but unfortunately, you took every one of these visits as something bad. We wish you luck in your future travels.