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Trip Report Sahara Trek Tour Company

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I am posting this as I had a horrible experience with this particular company and don't wish for others to go through the same thing. For some reason, it is challengng to find reviews of Sahara Trek online, so hoping this helps people in their decision making process.

Unfortunately for us, we chose Sahara Trek to plan and execute our honeymoon in Morocco in October 2011. It was by far, the worst trip of my life. I would need at least 7 paragraphs to go into detail, but the high level issues that we encountered were as follows: we were woken at 5:30 am at our hotel in Fez by a flock of thousands of birds congregating in the courtyard just outside our door, we had tour guides that only ushered us into stores (not historic attractions as we were promised) to attempt to get us to purchase items from their friends, we were repeatedly asked to pay for transportation and entrance fees while in Morocco even though all of that was supposed to be included in our payment to Sahara Trek, one of our drivers in Fez was more than 2 hours late after we woke up at SIX AM to meet them on our honeymoon, we had random tour guides picking us up and driving us from city to city while giving their friends a ride as well and ignoring us the entire time. Here's the kicker!!! The "desert camp" they had us stay at in the middle of the desert was the biggest hole I've ever seen in my life. You could not have paid me to stay in a place like that... especially on my honeymoon! The toilets appeared to have not been flushed for at least a week, they were unable to flush while we were there and there was no toilet paper. It was absolutely disgusting and unfortunately, after you drive 9 hours (took us a little longer since our driver got in a car accident on the way), you are kind of stuck in this awful place for the night. Lastly, as if we hadn't been through enough, we rode a train 3 hours to get back to Casablanca (after we paid for our tickets at the station even though we had already paid Sahara Trek for them), there was NO ONE there to pick us up. We borrowed a cell phone and called our driver who said he didn't know we were coming but that he would send someone. We waited outside with all of our bags for over an hour before calling him back. He then told us he couldn't come get us and to call the hotel. The hotel told us to take a cab... so after an hour and a half of waiting we paid our own way (again) for transportation that was supposed to be included. Once we arrived at our hotel in Casablanca, the incredibly rude staff told us to talk to a manager (who wasn't available at the time) about why we werent picked up at the train station. We went up to our room, found that the air conditioner was broken, the room was filthy and opted to (again) pay for accommodations somewhere else so that we could actually get some rest. These are just some of the issues we encountered on our trip. Overall, Sahara Trek offered ZERO value and we are out thousands of dollars, not to mention the most special trip of our lives together was completely ruined. Sahara Trek offered us $760 refund for some of the bad accommodations and guides, but that is less than 20% of what we paid for this trip. Unfortunately, our only other option is a trial-esque arbitration with the BBB, which I am not prepared to go through. We have opted to cut our losses and try and put this horrible experience behind us. I hope this review saves some other people from experiencing what we went through. It is an incredibly hopeless feeling to be in a foreign country and feel that the people you paid thousands of dollars to take care of you have COMPLETELY dropped the ball. Their customer service is non-existent and they obviously haven't researched any of the places they have you staying or any of the people that are guiding you on the trip. $760 is not even close to fair compensation for ruining my 2 week honeymoon and now my only recourse is to spend MORE of my free time building a legal case against this company.

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