Hi Debbie - what was your experience with Travelust? I write this post as a warning to anyone else considering booking your trip through them. We also took a trip to Uganda very recently and used Travelust. Quite simply, they gave us the best price - we should have realized why. I understand that this is a budget operation and we were in Africa. However, that is no excuse for the poor and unprofessional manner in which we were treated by James at Travelust. Our first warning sign was that for the duration of the 3 months we spent planning the trip, it would often take several emails and phone calls to James to get any responses to our questions. Then we would receive one quick response to the ten questions we had posted. A week prior to our vacation we had no confirmation or reassurance that any of our trip had been booked. He also was untruthful about drive times within Uganda. We were told that, for example, one drive time was 6 hours. In actuality, it took 10 hours to reach the hotel from which we would be doing gorilla trekking. We had to trek on 2 hours of sleep due to his dishonesty. Also, on the second to last day of our trip, our driver got into a car accident while we slept in the backseat. Though the accident was in Kampala, where Travelust is based, it took them 3 hours to get us a replacement car. We missed an entire day of our vacation, and then had to cancel white water rafting the following day due to whiplash we experienced. Finally, when we asked James for a small refund or some other way to partially make up for our negative experiences, he absolutely refused.

Moral of the story - STAY AWAY from Travelust. They are unprofessional and dishonest.

Hi. Sorry for the super long delay, only just saw your post now.

We enjoyed Travelust. We had some minor issues, but chalked them up to "that's Africa".

We may have had some delays in hearing back from James but he delivered on everything he promised. And we paid a fraction of what others did by using an African tour group.

What a weird thread.
Original posted 2006, a negative reply on first of 2011. Now a positive reply from OP 6 months later about their 2006 trip.

regards - tom

Duh! Tres tres strange!

I've never understood why people book a company, and THEN ask for experiences others have had.

"My tour company is Travelust. Does anyone have any experiences (good or bad) with this company? "

OK, then. Yikes. Someone had a fine experience. Someone else, recently, did not; and possibly made some flaky decisions while on their trip then chose to blame the booking agent for things beyond their control. Fodors may want to blank out some of the directly identifying info on the agent's response, but Ouch.

The couple in question did not pay us for their trip since they chose to pay for all expenses as they traveled. They requested a price breakdown of all the costs and we emailed them this.

Having failed to honor their reservations at places they asked us to book(Ngamba Island and their rafting trip with Adrift), they came back with a black mailing scheme for a 20% compensation. The reasons they gave for this were:

1: Their airline into Kigali was delayed by over 4 hours.

2: It took them longer to arrive Bwindi when their driver guide suggested use of an alternative route due to road works. Secondly, since they started late, the drive in the dark takes longer than day time driving.

3: A minor car accident(as they slept) in the heavy morning traffic involving another vehicle.

Most issues being raised were clearly out of our control and were dealt with by the local police and Insurance company.

It was so embarrassing that hazlis and boyfriend could not afford their already reserved activities that we booked for them.

Otherwise, email correspondences tell a very different story.