I booked this tour hoping to learn about the history/geological information about volcanoes and interesting facts about Hilo. My family and I were very disappointed for the following reasons:
1) We were scheduled to be picked up at the hotel at 8:45 AM, we got there on time, but the shuttle didn’t show up until 9:13 AM. There were no apologies or explanation given even when I tried to follow up with them to make sure that they didn’t miss us. We’ve been to other tours, and this is the first time a tour company was late.
2) The tour guide has very bad communication skills that it was not easy to understand him. Making it worse to the matter, he was not knowledgeable on the subjects that you’re not really learning anything from him. We were so frustrated, that we ended up listening to other tour guides and park rangers to learn about the volcanoes and interesting facts.
3) With kids on board, it was a huge turn off, unprofessional and unnecessary for the tour guide to even present the lava rock formation with the “symbol of women” or “symbol of men”.
4) When I called to reconfirm the tour, I was asked again to provide the names of all the attendants even though I have already entered it on their site. The lady asked me to provide it again for lunch. Well, there was really no lunch provided. You had to buy your own lunch and was only given 45 minutes (not enough time considering it’s a sit down lunch).
5) Though we know that the tour guide and owner tried hard to shower us around, overall the tour was very disappointing and uninformative, and we could’ve just toured the area ourselves considering the lack of information, no energy, lack of knowledge and unprofessional tour experience.