Alaskas Finest Tours & Adventures — Attraction in Alaska

Summary: company is unreliable and just plainly telling lies to get few extra dollars.

Details: I had very bad customer experience with the Girdwood Express service by Alaska's Finest tours & Cruises. The transfer was arranged in advance & confirmed over the phone. The evening before the transfer I got a text asking to call back the company. As I was in the sea (on a cruise) I could call back only the morning of the transfer during the cruise disembarkation. I was informed that the transfer can't be completed as arranged and must be postponed by 3.5 hours and there are no other options. I said "Well, fine". Later in the day as I realized that it's just impossible for a family to wait for over 3 hours on a gas station, I made another call to see if I can get anything earlier or at least to change the pickup point to another standard Girdwood Express pickup point at the lodge. The company said it's impossible as there is a lot of traffic due to a festival and a driver is already arranged. Both statements were just plain lies. The festival closures finished by 11AM, so there was no traffic problems (we were in the town and could see it). Also when we finally got on the bug around 6:15, the driver had no idea we are waiting for him and was just occasionally stopping as it was an unrelated excursion bus by same company. I suppose that's why company did not want the bus to go into the town to the regular stop location. The whole idea was just to get extra money instead of running proper Girdwood express. And this is even less understandable give our family paid for 4 people more than it would take to arrange a taxi from Girdwood...

This review is related to customer service and not an actual tour. I called the company the day before my scheduled tour because I wanted to cancel. It turned out the length of the tour was longer than I had anticipated and I was worried about being able to make a flight that evening. Also there was some confusion, at least on my part, about what tour I had actually booked. I spoke with three different people from the company about this situation. The first two women I spoke to were helpful and courteous. The first one offered an alternative tour, but I declined. The second called me back to clarify what I was requesting, and she ultimately told me I could get a refund because I was close to the 24-hour window and because there was some confusion about what I had booked. I didn’t get any type of confirmation that my original tour was canceled, so in order to make sure, I called the company later that same evening. This time I spoke to a man who told me he was the owner of the company. I started to tell him who I was and why I was calling. He very quickly interrupted and stated I was not canceled and there was no way I could get refund at that point, regardless of what I was told before. He was extremely rude and condescending on the phone, and he repeatedly cut me off when I tried to say anything. He said I was trying to manipulate the situation by lying to them. Bottom line: I can understand not getting a refund because of the cancellation policy 24 hour timeframe. However, he was completely unprofessional in how he spoke to me, and the whole thing could have been handled...

Our driver was a lovely and friendly person, so this doesn't apply to him. We had a terrible experience with the management. 3 things were not as advertised-- It says a max of 14 people. We had less than that in our car to get there (only 4 which was great), but our glacier hike group was over that. Obviously there were lots of people on the glacier as a whole, which is no biggie, but our tour group on the glacier itself was over 14. This lead to large crowds all trying to take pictures and distracting from the nature before us. They rely on a third party to do the glacier walk, and don't have control of how many people that third party books--would have just been nice to know/ expect. No provided snacks despite that being stated. We didn't expect lunch or anything because that was clearly excluded. We were given the wrong start time leading us to sit in cold and drizzling rain waiting for the tour to begin. We had confirmation in various emails from TripAdvisor and Viator, including the ticket itself from Viator, with the time; leadership did not inform us of any new start times despite claims. This was not that big of a deal, but when I called out to leadership they acted as if the new summer hours were obvious (they weren't as both TripAdvisor and Viator were not aware). Overall we were just frustrated at how management spoke to us when these issues were brought to light using phrases like "did we expect the glacier to be cleared just for us” which is not the case. Just a lack of...