We are seniors as were most others on our bus tour. This is a review of our recent 5 day/4 night bus tour (Aug. 14 - 18, 2016) with Travel Goodtime Tours to Graceland, Grand Ole Opry in Tennessee and the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio. All the attractions, mentioned above were great, and the Drury Hotels we stayed in were good. We seek no compensation from this tour company or his owner Peter, but just want to warn other people about the quality or lack thereof Peter and his company, Travel Goodtime Tours.
Our tour director/owner Peter and the bus we went in was another matter. We had no air conditioning on our bus for 4 out of 5 days we were touring the Southern United States during the summer. There were no windows to open on the bus and the air vents did not work most of the time, so there was no air moving, except for the 2 pop-up roof vents, which just let in hot summer air. As you can imagine it was very hot on this bus. It never really got cool, even when the air was suppose to be working.
The tour director/tour guide/owner of this company was not very professional and did not know any history of the cities Nashville or Memphis that we visited, compared to other bus tour directors with other tour companies we have used in the past. The bus was old and not very clean. The reading lights did not work. The tour director admitted to having gotten buses 4 times in the past where the air conditioning didn't work. Makes you wonder why he is still using the same bus company, if they don't provide reliable and clean buses. This bus didn't have any company name on it, which is not the norm for a tour bus.
The tour director/owner of Travel Goodtime Tours didn't want us to pay him by any credit card and we had to write a cheque or pay cash. He did not provide us with a receipt. He would not provide us with a basic itinerary to give to our relatives nor answer us on where we would be each night, even after asking many times before the trip. He would not do any business over the internet. All our communications with him were by phone, as per his insistence, even when we sent him an email, he phoned us and said he doesn't use email. Looks like he doesn't want a paper trail for some reason.
The last review on Travel Goodtime Tours website is from 2014 and all are glowing reviews. Makes you wonder why there haven't been any decent reviews since 2014.
He asked us to pack a overnight carry-on bag for our first night at a hotel, because he did not want to take our suitcases out of the bus and a very long 12 hour bus ride. Meanwhile, he and the bus driver had their suitcases. We would not mind packing an overnight carry-on bag, if he did the same. There was one set of rules for him and one set of rules for his passengers. We didn't have much communication with our bus driver, but he did a decent job, so we have no complaints with him.
We should have seen the red flags and avoided Travel Goodtime Tours, but he had cashed our cheque and seemed pleasant enough over the phone and we trusted him to provide good means of transportation. It did say in his ad that tours are on a comfortable bus. Sure we saw all the attractions that were offered, and stayed at good hotels, but the conditions of our bus ride was horrible and almost unbearable considering that most of the 5 days we were on that bus.
If you ever consider going on a bus tour with Travel Goodtime Tours, please reconsider or you could be stuck on a old, dirty, with non-working reading lights and no air-conditioning, which can get very hot, especially in the summer, considering the size and how many people a tour bus holds and the body heat those people give out.