Italy, Switzerland, Austria & Germany Review: Family Vacation, Cooking Class

If we were to take this trip again, we will use a different travel agent. Now this makes us think twice if using Zicasso iswill be worth it for our next trip. We had much fate in Zicasso that we even recommended it to our friend who is using it for their honeymoon. We only hope that they will have an excellent experience and none as we have recently.
 

Travel Company Comments
Dear Jennifer,
Thank you very much for your review regarding your family’s journey to Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. I am very sorry to hear you didn’t enjoy your trip as much as we would have expected. We take our clients’ feedback very seriously; allow me therefore to address, and respond to your points in further detail.

Navigating Alpine Europe by public transport, especially when traveling with family, can be tricky. Prior to finalizing your itinerary we have proposed several versions including transportation by private minivan and driver. This normally is our travelers’ preferred means of getting around these areas, as many of the smaller towns in Switzerland and Austria are not close to train stations served by Intercity and Express trains. These proposals, however, did not meet your budget needs, which is why we eventually agreed on an itinerary based on your family traveling by family Eurail pass. This lowered the total cost considerably below the average per-person, per-day rates for Switzerland and beyond, and you agreed on sourcing local transfers yourself. This of course requires continuous connectivity via smartphone in order to receive updates, call taxis or advise us, or a local guide, of any impending delays. On several occasions we tried to get in touch with you via mobile phone without success, and I asked you via text message to activate your international roaming as it appeared you were only able to communicate when connected to WiFi. The tight schedule, and frequent one-night stops, which you requested against our advice, of course require a much more regimented schedule, and short hold-ups thus easily resulted in missed activities.

Your Eurail pass came in an envelope containing detailed explanations regarding its use; I am very sorry if we didn’t stress the procedure enough, as you had more than 45 minutes at Milan Central Station on departure. We have indeed missed the Interlaken-Grindelwald tickets – totally our fault - and I immediately issued and emailed these to you. In addition, we invited you and your family to a chocolate making workshop in Lucerne to make up for our oversight.

Before your departure we provided you with a very detailed day-by-day program, detailing departure and transit times, timetables, as well as local contacts, location maps and instructions. I do apologize if our pre-trip phone call of approximately 45 minutes did not answer all your questions; I did, however, provide you with my personal cell phone number and encouraged you to contact me anytime if you required additional information. Our final itineraries provide extremely detailed instructions on a day-by-day basis, and during our conversation I encouraged you to download the PDF version onto your smartphone in order to refer to it when necessary. 

Please refresh my memory what exactly you mean by “brewery tasting that the guide didn’t deliver” – no such event had been part of your program.

On behalf of our team, I once more do apologize for any inconvenience experienced during your journey. I appreciate the frustration you must have experienced, and hope you will give us another chance to make it up to you when your plans call for travel to Europe again.

Thank you very much for traveling with our Company.