House of Travel

House of Travel gave me a FAKE ITINERARY! The owner of the business, Jerry, booked my hotels and then passed me along to his daughter, Michelle, to book our tours. After countless unanswered emails and ignored and unreturned phone calls, I finally asked Michelle if she no longer wishes to work with me. She assured me that she did and was putting together the tours. This was followed by a ridiculous number of mistakes when reserving our private tours (booking us for tours in the wrong cities, not providing meeting places, missing confirmation numbers, etc.) I also had to ask over and over again for our itinerary which I eventually received. Except it was fake. Our first booked tour was a food tour in Florence on Dec 23. Shortly before walking to the meeting place, we realized the confirmation number was missing. I contacted Ryan, the agent Michelle passed me to days before we left. The tour was never booked. We would have shown up at a location for a nonexistent tour. Ryan was luckily able to find one for us that evening. Next was our private tour for Siena and San Gimignano on Dec 24. There was no tour. It was just a driver with a van. A pizza making class was scheduled on Dec 25. We showed up and were told they haven’t done pizza making classes in four months. We had a Colosseum tour on Dec 26. I asked Ryan for the voucher since there was no confirmation number on the itinerary. He sent the voucher eventually and it had the wrong date of Dec 27, the day we were supposed to tour the Vatican. I asked if Michele never scheduled the Colosseum tour and if he booked it all last minute and I got a sketchy response. So, yes. It wasn’t booked. We had to cancel our Vatican tour as there was no way we could tour the Colosseum until 1 pm on the 27th and then eat lunch and get across town in one hour for a 2 pm Vatican tour. So aside from the hotels, the rest of our itinerary was fake. If Michelle didn’t want to continue working with us for whatever reason, she should have told us. Instead, the planning process was as painful as possible and we spent day after day of our trip stressed over not having tours and waiting for a different agent to scramble and try to find something for us. I wrote to the father and questioned why I was given a fake itinerary and he said he was surprised to hear this and would speak to his daughter and get back to me. I never heard from him again.