Dear Gray Line,
We…read morefeel it is our responsibility to describe our experience with your Grand Canyon tour on Saturday. We hope that our feedback will give you the information you need to address some real problems and to hopefully keep future guests from an experience like ours.
We are local residents of Las Vegas, and have dreamed of seeing the Grand Canyon for many years now. We thought of driving our three children there ourselves, but felt it would be worth the $450 investment to hire a "professional" company to lead us through this important life experience. Boy, do we regret our decision!
The following is a summary of why the tour fell far short of our expectations...
1. After spending 15 hours to meet the pickup bus at 5:30am at South Point and not return til 9:30pm, we only got to see the Grand Canyon for 1.5 hours. That's 90 minutes out of 15 hours! We felt ripped off, especially since we spent an equal amount of time at two rest stops and the bookstore cafeteria where we were invited to pay more money for an IMAX movie tour "upgrade." At least show us the informational DVD during the long, painful and boring bus ride!
2. The bus driver of our bus (#5705) would not stop talking for much of the trip. No one could understand what he was saying because of his accent and muddled speech. We wouldn't have minded so much, except that he shared almost nothing about the Grand Canyon, the very purpose of our trip, and instead spent much of his time rambling about other things. It wasn't until the ride home that he reluctantly played an informational audio file of a knowledgeable, professional and articulate gentleman sharing interesting factoids about the places we were driving through. He said he didn't like to play it, but reluctantly did "because the company makes (him) do so." We think it's because he would rather hear himself ramble and tell us about his personal schedule, etc. We weren't even given a map of the Grand Canyon until halfway through the day.
3. There was no itinerary given to help us have some idea of what to expect throughout the long and boring journey. Instead, the bus driver would give us muddled, verbal updates and then change them. We were told we would get three opportunities to see the Grand Canyon, but we're only given two. We were told when we paid for the trip we would be stopping for a nice breakfast. After waiting until after 9:30am to eat anything, we stopped in Kingman for "15 minutes" and were told we could grab something quickly to go if we needed to.
4. The late, and much-too-short breakfast stop was exacerbated by the fact that we stopped at Hoover Dam for an hour on the way. Although we enjoyed Hoover Dam, and it was the only time our bus driver shared some interesting factoids about what we were seeing, we paid to see the Grand Canyon for more than 90 minutes and to have a comfortable, professional trip there and back.
5. The bathroom on the bus would not flush after the first part of the trip, and caused our entire back section of people to have to cover our noses and share hand sanitizer with each other, to rub under our noses, in an effort to drown out the smell.
6. Rather than show or play anything educational or informational about the Grand Canyon throughout the long and boring journey there, he instead attempted to play a graphic, rated R movie (Training Day) and had to turn it off after 10 minutes because there were children on board listening to the graphic content. He apologized but still found time to scold passengers over the p.a. system if they were too slow getting back on the bus during stops, and talking to us like we were his children.
7. To cap the night off, the bus driver spent 10 minutes explaining why we should tip him "at least $5" on our way out, because he had been driving for a long time and working many days in a row. This was while he also announced he would not have time to drop the passengers off at their respective hotels, but had instead made arrangements for someone to shuttle them from the South Point so he could call it a night. We doubt he got many tips, other than some guilt tips, and his South Point shuttle plan appeared to fall through.
