UPDATE: after contacting them about the poor experience, they were kind enough to offer us a full refund. I do wish expectations were communicated better beforehand, since we stayed at Seward only for two days and we could have made a better use of our time.
Original review:
My experience has unfortunately been very disappointing, in contrast to all the great reviews I've read here. We signed up for the 6-hour glacier ice hiking trip, but we DID NOT end up hiking on glacier at all. We were only able to walk on glacier for one minute, and have pictures taken, and then went back. To make it worse, we carried all the gear (crampons, harness, helmet) up the mountain in the rain only to find out we did not get to use it all all. We were told that we spent 4 hours hiking to the glacier point and we didn't have enough time to actually hike on glacier. The guides were knowledgeable about mountain hiking, but they were poor about communicating expectations and time management. When we started the hike, we were told that we *have* to take all the gear up in our bag, but no one ever said that there is a chance we might not to get to use it at all. At the beginning of the hike, everyone in the group kept up, but the leading guide was told by another guide to slow down and keep a pace where people can hike and talk comfortably. Therefore, lack of time for glacier hiking was not a result of guests being slow or bad weather, but rather a result of the guides' poor time management. While the snow did make it slower to hike up, they never put microspikes in recommended gear nor provided it for the hike. All we got was an email a day before saying 'oh there's snow in higher elevations and be prepared for it'; well I was already packed and headed to Seward the day before, so there was no time for me even to get some microspikes from home. Overall I feel the trip was far from my expectations; their website said typical glacier hiking time is 1-2hrs for 6-hour trip, what they didn't say is that it's possible that we got ZERO time of glacier hiking.