Explorica

This is by far the worst company ever. After waiting 8 weeks for a refund check. They were such idiots to send the check made to my daughter’s name. When I called to complained the person that help me was horrible and nasty he even told me that I need it to send the check back in order to be able to reissue me a refund check. By the way I canceled the trip because of the lack of organization and the structure of this so called travel agency. I strongly suggest teacher and parents never to utilize this horrible company. They keep more than half of my money when I canceled the trip. I am terrible upset I used this company for trip.
*****don’t Ever use this company. *******

I strongly advise against working with Explorica. As a Chicago Public Schools teacher, I signed up as a chaperon of a tour to Cuba in March and planned to bring 6 – 7 students. To make a long story short, while we waited for approval from the school district, we raised close to $ 20,000 to pay for the trip and we were able to get our students passports since none of them had passports. In early January, we finally received approval and were ready to pay Explorica. Through a lot of shady conversations, dodged e-​mails, unreturned phone calls, we eventually were told that our spots were no longer available. I can understand that Explorica wanted to fill the tour to its maximum capacity, but what I can’t understand is how they were willing to work with us for 4 months while we awaited approval, and then when our spots on the trip were given to another school, they did not communicate that with us. We had to call Costumer Service and explain the situation to someone else who then talked to his boss, and THEN we heard from the woman we were working with, Allison. Allison explained over the phone how those spots were never ours to begin with, and there was nothing she could do. She was 100% unapologetic, arrogant, and unfriendly. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable to want a little people skills when working with a travel agency. The only positive thing I can say about Explorica is the Costumer Service rep, Jesse, was professional and honest.

our daughter got her passport stolen the day before a school trip to europe and they didn’t want to reschedule the trip even though we paid for the insurance insurance. we wanted to send our daughter to europe by our own expense as soon the new passport arrived and went to the airport to ask for the airline to keep the returning ticket for her to get home from europe and they told us that explorica was the only one could do it since it was a group booking. so we called them back in front of the airline agent and after a long comversation via phone they agreed to keep the returning ticket. after two hours they called us back to tell us that the airline ticket said that they couldn’t do it. it was unbelievable!
the airline agent told us in the airport that we have to be very strong with them because they will still get the money back from those unused plane tickets and they will not refund us anything.

I’ve been nothing but disappointed in dealing with Explorica. I decided to help a family friend on a trip with their High School and Explorica was difficult to deal with and continually added fee’s and additional charges for varying reasons until my total was almost double the amount I was originally quoted. So frustrating! I cannot speak to the quality of the actual trip as the student I now decided to pull out but I can say that I would never ever choose to work with this company again.

The registration and payment system was a nightmare but in the end it was a great trip.

Our daughter went on an abominably run trip to Spain with Explorica a couple of years ago and I have been looking for a place to put out the word that this is not a company to send your children with. One of the tour leaders had to leave a week into the trip, leaving only one leader with 25 teenagers. The leader who remained was checked out and the kids went out drinking at night with her doing nothing about it.
They nearly left 7 kids in Morocco, but the kids themselves had their acts together and alerted the driver and leader to the situation so they waited for them to get to the bus. The leader couldn’t have cared less.
After a week of getting complaints from many of the parents, a manager from Boston flew over to take care of things. I had spoken to him several times about the issues and after the trip I tried to reach him but he did not return calls.
There are lots of better options out there.