Titan Travel - www.titantravel.co.uk

August 2023. Banff was beautiful, very hot and interesting. British Columbia and the Icefields are awesome. Onto Jasper for 1 night and then 2 days on the Rocky Mountaineer (it’s expensive but upgrade to Gold - it is sheer luxury). Overnight stay in Kamloops - made friends with 2 lovely local fireman who were stationed outside our hotel. Vancouver is beautifull. Must do’s are Vancouver Island and the world famous Butchart Gardens. You will walk your feet off. Overall this is a whistle stop tour but you will enjoy it. Only downside is the hotels are tired (definitely only 3 star) and the tour guide never stops talking. You really should speak up instead of moaning amongst yourselves as we did. There are times on the coach when you just want to drink in the breath-taking scenery but the guide drones on all the time - sure some of it is interesting but it is overload. Having said that we did like our Tour Guide. Looking through the reviews for all the different Titan holidays this seems to be a common thread - guides who drone on forever. Titan please take note and do something about it because we already have 2 more big holidays booked with you.

We went on "Jewels of the Aegean"/"Greek Island Medley" in October 2023.

We were a big crowed of 44 people.. mostly in our late 70's, 80's and even over 90years, which was way too big.

Our VIP pickup time was 7.30 am in the morning, for an early flight the following day, necessitating an overnight hotel stay and awful food, despite other guests being picked up in the evening and only two hours further south on the same route to Heathrow. The only option we were given was to pay £500 for a Private transfer, which we refused ! The Saga driver, I have to say, was excellent, and the transport was comfortable in a saloon car. The return journey was not ! We were in a transit van with rear facing and forward facing seats, which was not conducive for a long journey.

Our tour manager left a lot to be desired. He was loud,(you could hear him shouting across the hotel foyer "Team Titan") which is not what you or other guests in the hotel want to hear. He was very vocal and rude, and at the time, refused to refund our euros 120, for a tour he cancelled. This has partially been repaid by Titan, as he had refused to reimburse us, and only after many letters and phone calls by our travel agent.

However, his attitude to my wife was intolerable, in her face, to an extent that even other guests were concerned about her. The effect of this marred our holiday.

To date, we are still looking for compensation, but Titan continue to not answer phones, every letter says 28 days, and even that date they do not adhere to.

It seems that the amalgamation of Titan and Saga is only going to get worse.

In the past we have travelled with both companies, since 2009, as individual companies, but now since amalgamation, they are both lowering standards, and customer care has deteriorated beyond belief, with ridiculous response times.

We await a satisfactory resolution to our complaint, but sadly we will probably not book another holiday, unless there is a remarkable upturn in your customer relations. After all it is us, the public who pay to keep you in employment.

Taste of The Douro valley tour review , September 2023

We have just come back from a tour through the Douro valley with Titan. We were quite surprised at the size of the group (46) as when we have traveled before with them, the groups were around 20. A lot of people were quite elderly, one gentleman being 92 and we lost him quite a few times.

We stayed in 3 different hotels from the same range. The first one Termas De São Vicente in Pinafiel should be dropped from their list. It was very outdated with dodgy air conditioning and intermittent wifi in the bedroom. The other hotels were more modern. The food was average for a 3* let alone a 4*. The staff were always helpful but there was a shortage of staff.

The few people in our group needing special dietary treatment (vegan, vegetarians) seemed to take most of the ressources. They expected something special cooked for them every morning and evening meal!

We feel that the quality was variable and the location was far from ideal. They were remote from the areas we were visiting.

All in all, it was a pleasant holiday. It was well paced and our tour leader was very competent and helpful. She had a few challenges for sure!

I loved this tour. I found our drivers for the transfer from home to hotel excellent and very entertaining. Our rep who accompanied for the whole tour was extremely efficient and all the guides were very knowledgeable. The hotels were all superb and of an excellent quality especially The Mai Hotel in Saigon where the food was of cordon bleu quality. Titan took us to all the key places and I cannot fault their organisation.

I have stopped using Titan . On my last two (Mexico and California and the Golden West), I was driven to distraction by "The Shouting Lady". This is a woman, sometimes the guide, sometimes a local , who starts shouting at ear-splitting volume as soon as the bus starts. Even though I wear industrial ear protectors my ears hurt. Don't Go !

Last year we did the Isle of Wight tour not perfect but the Royal Hotel was superb.

This year we did the Cotswolds tour. Our transfers were excellent. Our tour guide was also excellent. We enjoyed the itinerary very much especially Suddley castle.

Our hotel very sadly has some serious issues. Rooms only cleaned and made up if requested. The food was extremely disappointing given what we had paid. One guest in particular was very upset because she had booked this for her husband's 80th birthday. The staffing levels were dire and my husband waited in a queue, for 30 minutes to get a drink at the bar. The staff did their utmost best but I found myself clearing off a table in order to sit down with our drinks. The scant staff really worked very hard. She had been there all day doing reception, domestic duties and worked in the dining room. It was not possible to order a bottle of wine at the table. It was do it yourself at the bar.

So we are unsure whether to book with Titan again.

Sinking rapidly thanks to the general incompetence and ineptitude of middle and senior management.

I spent over 10 years working as a Tour Manager and have seen this company since it was taken over by the ACROMAS group ( holding group of Saga) and have seen its gradual destruction and deterioration especially following it's amalgamation and closer integration with Saga.

Everything from product design to customer service, financial control, brochure creation, marketing, brand identity or their USP VIP taxi transfer service to the quality or experience of the staff hired is poor and increasingly so.

Not once did I notice any improvement, despite constant suggestions and recommendations just a general deterioration and destruction of the company and everything it used to stand for and believe in.

Across the board from senior to middle management and then the lower echelons of office staff alarming examples of ineptitude, incompetence and a toxic work culture, more so with all the uncertainty with their future employment.

Suggestions from Tour Managers as to how a product would work better were mostly ignored or looked upon with disdain and so mistakes repeated and the customer experience affected.

In addition in the last few years Tour Managers who felt it necessary to point out these failings were often threatened by management AKA: Customer Service Director  that they keep quiet if they wanted to continue with the company. A nasty piece of work.

The company recently - to desperately save costs - started making redundant most of their employees who had any decent experience or could think for themselves or wouldn't be cowed by his threats. He knew he could threaten Tour Managers in his particular way, because they weren’t actually employed by the company and so had no legal protection under ordinary employment law.

As a result of poor behaviour and management and in addition to the some of the lowest Tour Manager fees in the industry (as well as poor salaries for office staff), most if not all of the quality Tour Managers decided not to work for this company again.

My advice to CEO and Non-Exec Chairman, for starters get rid of Director of Titan and  Director of Customer Experiences- two of the most incompetent managers I've experienced in over 25 years working in the travel industry.

Also perhaps Senior Management might like to do a little investigation on MG on exactly what he's up to at Titan and how he brings his extra-curricular activities into his management style in the work place?

Oh, he's very sneaky...

I have files and detailed reports, highlighting all kinds of instances of gross incompetence and general ineptitude of management covering three or four years working with this company which I would be happy to share with Senior Management.

had a great holiday very informative.but the vip transfers were appalling'our journey home from heathrow to blackpool via melton Mowbray was the final straw 7 hours 30 minutes.the router needs to look at a real map not google.

We got back last Friday - 8th March 2019. The tour DID follow the itinerary pretty much as expected, but the impression we had before doing the trip was that we would have a fair bit of downtime to relax as there are a number of references to afternoons at leisure and free time in the bumph. That didn't happen very often. We were either travelling - a lot - sightseeing late, or eating and sleeping, with what seemed to be an awful lot of early wake ups at the end of the trip. I think the earliest was 4:30 at Varanasi (which was OK as it was expected), but I think we had a couple of 5.30 wake-ups too which were hard work. We weren't helped by the fact that Jet Airlines - Titan's main choice of flight - are pretty much on the way out, so one of our internal flights was canclled which left us with a 12 hour drive one day...Jet were frankly bad in my opinion. If we ever do a Titan Trip again and Jet are still functioning, we will ensure that we use someone else. They are a poor budget choice which Titan obviously use because they are cheap...

The hotels that we used were extremely good, but if you like beer - which we do - it was incredibly expensive in the hotels. I think the most expensive worked out at about £15 a pint... A 330ml bottle was about 500 Rupees. On top of that we got hit by local taxes, service charge, a contribution to uncle Tom Cobley and something else I think. So we paid about 700 Rupees for that. Double that up and you are up to the 15 quid for a pint! But there you go. They WERE all nice hotels. Food in the hotels was extremely good and I don't think any of our trip had serious tummy problems. So well done there. Both our British guide and local guide were absolutely spot on. 10 out of 10 for them both. When we weren't eating as part of the inclusive bits, our guide took us to local places which were uniformly very good - and the beer was a lot cheaper at these too! The itinerary itself was very varied - temples, tigers ( bumpy, bruising, uncomfortable trips but we saw them every time we went out), Taj Mahal, the Ganges and a lot more besides. It was a good, well organised trip which worked because of the guides and the fact that the 25 people on the trip - average age about 60 probably - all got on very well. Over that number is pushing it a bit in my opinion as you all have to get on and off the bus for the loo, visiting sites, or to eat and that obviously takes time which eat into any spare time we could have had.

Last thing is the VIP door-to-door service. VIP means Very Important Person. It doesn't mean a taxi jammed with 6 people + the driver, some of whom had to come from Shepton Mallet, via Ringwood and Fleet to get to Heathrow! So Titan should call a spade a spade and say a taxi will be provided which may make significant detours too and from the airport!

But still 4 out of 5 as it was a good trip overall!

We wouldn't do this tour again if it was free. We booked for a special birthday but it was such a let down. Late starts, arrivals at hotels mid afternoon, middle of nowhere with nothing to do. Stayed in LA but saw nothing, stayed in the worst hotel in Vegas, tour guide was just patronising and kept reminding us about this tip!

Too much driving, not enough time at many of the stops, poor hotels (except for one), we couldn't wait to fly home and will never use Titan again. We did manage to get a small refund after complaining to Abta