Holiday Planning
A group of us are booked on to a dive trip to the Galapagos in 2007. We decided to go when we read a dive trip report on YD, some of us had recently returned from a very successful Redsea live aboard trip and after reading the report we decided to meet up at the dive show and have a chat about it. We spoke to Maldives Scuba Tours who some of us had dealt with in the past and we wanted to use a boat called Deep Blue , we had found some very positive reports on the internet so this was the boat for us. We discussed our plan with MST and they gave us until the end of October to fill the places on the boat, if we did this we would be able to get a full charter discount.
After contacting a few people we were able to put our plan into action, so we paid an initial deposit of £250 and sat back waiting for October 2007 to come round.
I have done loads of searching on the internet for flight options and trip extensions, as it is such a long way to go it would be better to combine this trip with an add on to Machu Picchu
A few days ago we were issued with an ultimatum because of some issues the boat crew have recently had with European guests, apparently we aren’t as generous as our American cousins, the US boat operator has decided to make tipping a mandatory part of the trip for European guest and therefore has contacted MST to inform them of their decision. To say we weren’t happy with this is an understatement and much communication followed, we were informed that the US owner would not move on this discision and if we didn’t agree to the charge they would cancel our trip.
It is very sad that unfortunately some of our group have decided to cancel but I have decided to continue with the trip, although I would have preferred to make my own decision on whether the crew have worked for their tip.