I have noticed several posts which are very down on ATR and their ground operator. Why is this? What did I miss last year when I enjoyed my safari with them? We are hoping to go to Tanzania again next year, and I am planning to use ATR again unless you can convince me otherwise.....

Maybe others weren't as fortunate as you. Might not have anything to do with ATR, but a client's expectation and not having appropriate information before making their decision. If the plans you have for your next safari are coming along as you wish. Though it is interesting to read others comments, and for those that are of concern you should follow-up directly with ATR.

Work with the same agent, request the same guide--if you had a good trip before why not?

I had a few bumps with ATR but we really liked our guide and had an incredible time.

Where ya headed???

Found them too pricey, comparing apples to apples. Did not use them.

So it is just the price that puts people off? I got the impression there was more to it from some of the postings. From Holland ATR offered us by far the best deal. The Dutch companies charged the same as ATR but only offered the big lodges, which we wanted to avoid, and sometimes, even worse, only offered group game drives.

We are hoping to go back next year, time yet to be fixed, depends on my husbands work when he can take a long break. He is 60 next year so we want a celebratory trip. (Last year was for our 30th wedding anniversary). I would love to go to Selous as well this trip. Just beginning the dreaming part of planning it.....

I came very close to booking my safari to Tz with ATR last week. We are going to Manyara, Ngorongoro, Loliondo and Serengeti in March/April.

I found ATR to be price-competitive, and their staff were very helpful and efficient. My only criticism of the lady I dealt with in London was that she continually pushed their preferred accommodation (even though it is not at first clear that they have any links with the lodges in question), and I had to be very firm in insisting on my chosen lodges. For example, I told her 3 times that I didn't want to stay at Gibb's Farm, and every time my itinerary came back with "I have left Gibb's Farm on, as I really think it is better for you than Kirurumu". I gather other people have had similar experiences.

The main reason why I chose not to use them at the last minute was that I read in a few places (on this forum, and other similar sites) that the ground operator used in Tz is either i) very inconsistent (sometimes good, sometimes bad), or at worst ii) consistently bad.

They use Mount Kilimanjaro Safari Club, which is a very large operator. I read reports of vehicles in poor condition (e.g., cracked windows, broken doors, breakdowns), and guides who were unhelpful, not knowledgeable and rude (e.g., taking over 5 mobile phone calls each day during game drives and not keeping the car clean).

I can't comment on whether these reports are actually true, but I did not want to take the risk, especially since ATR are not the company I would be dealing with once I got to Tz.

I decided instead to go with Green Footprint, a small Dutch-owned (I think) outfit, based in Tz, who run their own ground operations. They had favourable reviews, and the lady I dealt with there has been absolutely wonderful. It's still a gamble, but I would not have felt comfortable taking the risk with ATR, having read what I read. They also recommended some different accommodation which looks to be absolutely wonderful. They are slightly more expensive than ATR (about 5%), but helpful in identifying ways to take cost out of the trip.

Hope that helps.

To be fair to both ATR ansd MKSC, many of the specific complaints (the cracked window, the 5 calls a day, unknowledgable, etc.) listed above came from ONE trip report. Also, as you know from having traveled with them in the past, hetismij, you do in fact still deal with ATR (Petra) on the ground in TZ.

Do agree that they are pretty inflexible about their accommodations.

There was definitely more than one on this site, and a couple of others on different sites. I will try to find the links over the weekend.

I asked ATR about it, and they admitted that "we have had several complaints, but 80% of our customers are extremely happy". That they said 80% didn't do much to encourage.

Obviously, if we had chosen them it would *probably* have been absolutely fine, and not having ever met or seen any of their ground grew, my comments are vicarious at best.

hetismij

Like you, we had a fab time with ATR and MKSC. Trawling around this forum, its easy for an occasional negative comment to get endlessly recycled. Don't take any notice of second-hand experiences or speculations.

I dealt with ATR a bit in getting a quote, but ultimately didn't go with them. Their inflexibiity with their accommodations is what finally decided me to go with Roys. However, I did find them responsive and detailed.

I'll note that in general, people are more likely to post about their bad experiences than their good experiences on the internet. A small business owner once told me that it takes 12 good reviews to make up for one bad review. Though, if ATR is only getting an 80% satisfaction rate, they really ought to reconsider their ground operator or insist on changes.

If you had a good time with them, then by all means go again.

I agree, I would not risk several thousand dollars and a lot of effort on something I thought had only 80% chance of satisfaction. Also, if the salesperson is saying 80%, then the real number is likely 60%. I know everything has a risk but looking at 90% or higher for me. If we can even quantify with numbers to this degree.
regards - tom

Hi, this is Greg Welby, Managing Director of ATR. I must confess to being a forum virgin, so please forgive me if it is out of turn for me to speak here, but I do feel that some kind of right to reply should be offered, there is so much mis-information being passed that I really would like to comment on a few things. If anyone wants to speak to me personally about any issues then I am available by phone or email thru our website.

First off I would like to point out something which is very obvious to us, but seems not to be to other forum users here ... which is that a number of the contributors actually work for our competitors. We know this for a fact. We find that a negative tirade is usually initiated against us (and other successful agents) around the start of each major bookings season, so this type of Jan/Feb episode is nothing new to us. I guess this is what they call tall poppy syndrome and I guess we have to live with it. Fortunately it only seems to apply in the Arusha area, which is particularly competitive, sometimes in a rather sharp way. I too could have posted here under a pseudonym, but that goes very much against our grain here at ATR, where we have always beleived in absolute honesty, even when that is to our direct cost.

On more specific issues ...

2. Customer satisfaction : quoted by members jamesc1892 and cary999 : I'm not sure where this mis-quoted figure of 80% satisfaction comes from. All good businesses target and manage their satisfaction levels. We define our worst level of complaint as one which requires a refund and we set a target of 1% for this (which is very low in Africa). Last year we actually achieved 0.4%, which amounts to around 20 complaints in total. It should be noted that most of these are simple complaints by customers who were otherwise delighted, but who were let down by a lodge or a transfer. All were refunded and I would say that 18 of 20 were very happy with the post trip service, the remaining 2 ... well there are always some people who can never be pleased and some trips which really did go awry and no amount of post trip service and refunds will placate. But it is such a tiny number this last group, less than 1 in 2500 guests. We intend to start publishing our customer feedback and ratings on our new website later this year, so that the dialogue that we have with our customers is there for all to see, we have nothing to hide.

2. Lodge inflexibility : posted by jamesc1892 and others : This issue is strongly linked to the previous one. After 7 years of experience, we know that some lodges deliver higher success ratings for customers than others. We therefore try to drive our customers in the direction of lodges that we love and know can deliver time and time again. When a customer is very strongly requesting a less reliable or lesser experience lodge, then the easy thing for us to do would be to return with a quotation as requested. We take on a considerable amount of additional effort and risk losing customers in order to try to maximise their experience. We understand that this often can be perceived as being prescriptive rather than helpful, but we will continue to do this because we need to feel confident about the trips we put together, in order to keep the satisfaction rate as high as possible
and to get the aforementioned complaint rate even lower. We feel that our apparent lodge inflexibility is actually a major indicator of the fact that we care about our trips and are dilligent rather than any negative. Ultimately if you push us hard we will book any lodge with a lower experience level, but no amount of pushing will get us to book lodges where the complaint rate is unacceptably high. Another associated issue here is availability, which can drive very hard in the direction of one lodge over another.

3. Too pricey : posted by dssxxxx (other postings also indicate that we offered the lowest prices in some marketplaces) : For most trips we would expect to be amongst if not the lowest price quote. The only areas where this might not be the case is for real mainstream mass market trips, where the big multi-nationals have the jump on us, but this is not really our patch. There are also companies out there which better service the real budget-camping type of safari, which we choose not to address. In any other case where we are not the lowest quotation gained by a prospective customer, then I invite you to send it through to us and we will try to beat any like-for-like bona-fide quote by a decent margin for you. Feel free to refer to me personally if you wish. The biggest problem in this area is comparing quotes to see if they are like-for-like. There are so many ways in which an agent can artificially lower a quotation, there are so many tricks that can be pulled. In northern Tanzania we could problem skin 25% or more of cost by making some items "invisible" at the point of booking. We do not believe in doing this and we try to note up every little cost that we can, including tips and the like, in order that our guests are best informed when booking a trip. There is also the issue of corruption and cowboy operators, there is no way we can quote competitively against a safari company which does not pay its taxes, which "borrows" vehicles from the UN, which dodges park fees etc etc. I do not want to sling too much mud here, but guests do need to be aware that this kind of thing can take place (although much reduced in recent years thank goodness). We have always operated on as low a margin as we can, as we want our company to grow, in fact we have plans to lower our margins more over the next years. I am confident that like-for-like we should be either as cheap as the lowest competitors and much cheaper than most, especially in USA and Canada.

4. Specific complaints : I did not bother to trawl through to find info on the specific complaints referred to periodically (a cracked window seems to keep recurring). The bottom line it this ... (a) these things can occasionally happen, we work very hard to keep them to a minimum and (b) I would ask you to ask yourself what kind of customer complains in public about such things rather than talking to us about it at the time or after the event. Anything going wrong in the field should be dealt with at the time, we have the resources so to do. If a customer does not mention a complaint whilst there is a chance for us to do something about it then it seems unfair to complain about it afterwards. We put out over 500 safaris per year into the northern parks of Tanzania, it is a major logistical operation with a very complex product. I therefore return to my earlier point, I think that our complaint rate under such circumstances is extraordinarily low - if it were not then we would either be doing something serious to get it down or we would be getting out of the business completely ... we are a passion business and if it all added up to just making people miserable then we would pack it all in and go home!

A final word. We are very proud to say that ATR has been, and hopefully will continue to be, a very successful venture. We are the leading worldwide agent into Tanzania and growing fast in other countries. We have won numerous awards and in 2006 were the 27th fastest growing company in UK. The only way to get ahead in a sector like this is through customer satisfaction. Our referral & repeat business has grown from 0% in 1999 to 65% in 2007. There's a lot of happy customers out there, but I am continuing to resist the temptation to email them all to get them to get onto this forum to say so!

If you managed to get this far, well done! I know it has been a bit of a rant. We have some very exciting plans for the next two years, we expect to be really changing the way safaris are put together and to provide you safari heads out there will some serious tools for fun and function. Stick with it. And as I say, anyone who wants to talk to me can, just call the number on our website. I probably won't be logging onto this forum very regularly, so a direct approach will be more effective.

Safari njema (whoever you book with)!

Thankyou Greg! I was very satisfied with my trip last year, loved every second of it, and only found this forum afterwards. I began to wonder if there was something I was missing, or if I had been very naieve last year after reading some of the negative comments here. I am saving hard and hope to be contacting ATR later in the year for next years trip. The nay sayers haven't convinced me.

I will reply, since I was mentioned.

The prices I requested and received for my specific trip were identical. ATR was at least $500 - $1000 per person higher than Roy, Sunny, GE and some others.

I could/would give the forum the exact pricing is I kept it (I might have it and will check) but I think I got rid of all operators that were out of the ball park and we did not think we would use.

I have no affiliation to any outfitter and am only basing my coments on "real" info gathered through emails from ATR and others.

in response to dssxxx ...

... as i mentioned previously, our prices will not necessarily be the lowest if you are talking about either mass market lodge safaris or budget camping safaris. the operators you mention specialise in one or both of these.

i would describe our area of speciality is in quality small lodge safaris (mid to high end) with innovative itineraries often including unusual routes, walking and camping segments.

i do not think we are comparing like for like here, (for example, our "flycamping" is serviced by a second vehicle and staff in remote private campsites, not out of the back of the same truck, put up on arrival in busy public campsites), but probably neither of us can be bothered to go back and run a check. i'm glad you enjoyed. these are decent safari companies you are talking about, they just do things differently to us for a different market. i'm sure you will have been well looked after and that you and they may have been better matched then us and you. we do not expect even in our greatest world domination plan moments to operate all safaris into africa, live and let live, we just get a bit tired of the kind of negative spiral that these forums can get into from time to time. wish you all the best. hey, it's quite addictive this forum thing eh??!

<b>If you managed to get this far, well done! I know it has been a bit of a rant.</b>

Greg, though I am not familiar with ATR and have used one of your competitors on our three Tanzania safaris I must say that your response was very professional and informative. Thanks for taking time to post.

Bill

If you are new to this forum, how do you know some of the tirades are posted by competitors?
Several of the complaints I've read about ATR were from known posters who were on here for months prior to their trips....it would be hard to believe that some of these people who have posted personal pictures of themselves and details about their live overseas are actually competitors.

Greg, thanks for your reply(s). Many times here on the forum our discussions are like the old story about describing an elephant by having 6 blind persons feel/touch it. Everyone has a different description of the elephant depending on which part they are touching. So in many of our discussions we are each contributing our own piece and it is difficult to put together a clear picture of the reality. Thanks again.
regards - tom
ps - I'm not trying to speak for the group here, just my perception, just my part of the elephant

Ok, so having said all of the above and defending ATR's response, I ask, is it appropriate for a &quot;vendor&quot; to contribute to this forum? Is it appropriate that every time one of us criticizes a &quot;vendor&quot; or safari operator that that operator defends themselves on this forum?
regards - tom

Greg,

I would like to reiterate what has been said above - your response was tremendously measured and professional. Seeing negative comments about the business you sweat to run must be soul-destroying. But you were lucid and fair. I am mightily impressed. With an attitude like that it is unsurprising that you are in the Fast Track. Congratulations.

I am sure your comments are all correct, and I hope I was clear in my original post that I was explaining the reasons why I chose not to proceed with ATR and not making my own allegations. My decision was based purely on risk-aversion. Given the amount of money in question, and the extent to which we would be helpless if the ground operation was poor when we arrived in Tz, even a whiff of poor service was enough to put me off. I guess that is the price you pay for being in such a competitive market - your customers have plenty of alternatives. It does suck, though if competitors post mis-allegations. For which it's worth, I did check as best I could the provenance of your detractors, and I saw no evidence that they were other operators.

Where I do take some issue is on lodge recommendations. This was the only area on which I could fault your sales agent. Otherwise your UK-based team has been the best I have dealt with. I persistently expressed a preference for Kirurumu as I had a good friend who strongly recommended it. Your pateranlism in trying to stop your customer stayings at lodges you don't like is in some ways admirable. However, it isn't credible - you clearly have different margins and commissions from differnet accomodation options, so applying pressure on your customers just seems like you are trying to push them to places which will make you more money. This may not be the case, but without evidence to the contrary, many or most customers will believe that is what you are trying to do.

On price - you were very competetive, I can't fault you there.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to post, and I hope that you representation on these boards becomes a better reflection of your operation.

James