Pacificislands Dot Com

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We used PacificIslands.com to book our Honeymoon vacation to French Polynesia and had a terrible, terrible experience.

1. We originally booked with them four days in Tahiti and four days in Bora Bora with flight from US and flight between the islands included. The day before we left for our trip we found out that the company switched our itinerary on us. In the new itinerary we would have half a day layover in Tahiti, then four days in Bora Bora, then 3 days in Tahiti. We found out about this by accident, because we contacted the hotel in Bora Bora on an unrelated issue and they had us booked for different days than what we were promised. When we contacted PacificIslands.com, they admitted that there was a change in the itinerary, but kept insisting that the new arrangement wasn’t any worse, even though we were losing one day in Tahiti and had an extra unnecessary transfer between hotels (spent extra day packing/moving/unpacking).

2. Once we booked they promised to provide us with documents detailing our trip. They never sent us anything. Once we arrived to Tahiti there was some confusion with our pickup, that we couldn’t resolve because we didn’t have any documentation of our trip. All the local workers were very surprised we didn’t have any documentation – this is not standard procedure. We believe PacificIslands.com didn’t send us anything intentionally, so we wouldn’t find out about them changing our itinerary in advance (see problem #1).

3. On our transfer to Bora Bora we found out at the airport that our flight reservation was “cancelled”. We don’t know how PacificIslands.com screwed this up, but we ended up buying tickets ourselves (the direct flight we were supposed to have was sold out). We were lucky there was another flight on the day at all. In the end PacificIslands.com refunded us the money, but we still had an hour of panic at the airport.

4. There were also a bunch of smaller annoyances that added up to a lot of hassle – suites booked with two single beds (on a trip that was our honeymoon), no breakfast voucher as promised in the original itinerary, late checkout that was promised and never arranged. Having to spend time every day emailing back and forth to fix things instead of enjoying our vacation, and being dealt with in bad faith (e.g. being told that a promised event was sold out, when it was not)

In the end we were offered an insulting $216 (less than 3% of the total package cost) to make it up to us, but we did not feel like this came even close to compensating us for the huge number of problems that could be traced to the company’s incompetence or negligence.

We would strongly warn anyone away from dealing with PacificIslands.com. It is absolutely not worth your time. But if you decide to deal with them anyway, do yourself a favor:

1. Insist on full detailed documentation of your full itinerary as soon as possible after booking. Insist on getting confirmation numbers for all hotels and flights.

2. Check directly with the hotels, and airlines. You can email the hotels to confirm all details.

3. Find out the name and contact information of the local travel agency that PacificIslands.com works with. In our case it was Tahiti Tours. Knowing the contact information of the local agency representative would have saved us a lot of trouble – this is someone you can talk to who is in the same time zone as you.