As always, there are so many different companies, tour guides and tour operators to choose from when planning your east coast experience. I think mainly it’s a case of you win some, you lose some, where a great deal can be offered on one thing in one place, a better deal can be had on a different trip through somewhere else. As once again, time was against us, we decided to use a travel company to book our bus tickets, Whitsundays sailing and Fraser Island trip.
We chose Indie Travel, mainly because after spending a good couple of hours chatting to us, we thought the girl in there had earned our custom, it’s a shame she wasn’t in there the following day to do the booking! (Another deciding factor was the fact that we won a couple of free trips by attending their pizza night!)
Anyway, Indie Travel, they are friendly enough but a bit useless! Obviously they’re not overly cheap as they are an agency and it’s their job to make money but with that I at least expect decent service. The girl on the first night was great, discussed loads of options with us and helped us with an itinerary but once it got to actually booking, things changed… Incorrect documents were printed out, we didn’t get any info on where to meet/what to do about our trips, they failed to tell us some T&Cs of hostel vouchers that they gave us (2 night limit on the deals and Absolute backpackers, Mission beach was actually $1.50 more per person per night than stated on the voucher)…generally they were trying a bit to hard to pretend to be everyone’s best friend that they failed to deliver on some of the basics.
We booked everything in one go (hoping to cash in on bulk buying) up in Cairns at the beginning of the trip, you may find cheaper or last minute deals closer to the destinations themselves but then you risk things booking up, especially in the run up to Christmas, things get crazy busy and we needed to book up at least 3 weeks ahead.
ADVICE: Book direct where you can – use the agencies to get info and then haggle for a better deal elsewhere, we did win 2 free trips, Fitzroy Island (1 person) turned out to be too expensive to buy the second, ticket especially as it wasn’t on our radar anyway but we did cash in on the free surf lesson with Black Dog Surf School in Byron Bay (will let you know how that goes!)
ALSO NOTE: In Australia there are a lot of additional fees to be paid on arrival for trips, such as reef taxes and national park fees. These can really add up (can run into $100′s per trip) so need to be taken into account when booking. Always ask whoever you are buying your tickets from so you don’t get a nasty shock!
