Tour Operators - Imaginative Traveller

I travelled with ImTrav in 2009 along the Silk Road and in 2010 in Syria. The Silk Road trip was good and well-led, but the operational staff were about to be made redundant following the acquisition of the company by the giant TUI group and the local leaders were to be made self-employed. The Syria trip in 2010 was very disappointing. The Syrian travel company which acted as the local handler was poorly organised and the hotels sub-standard. Imaginative Traveller no longer operate holidays themselves - they just sell under their own name trips which are actually run by Gecko, also part of the TUI group. If anything goes wrong, you have to take it up with Gecko in Australia, as we found to our cost. ImTrav in the UK just forward all complaints to Australia so you are not really dealing with a British company. They are just a front now, which is a great shame because they were an OK company. I had no previous experience of Gecko, but they certainly on this occasion were not exercising effective oversight of the local handler. TUI is clearly aiming to consolidate the 20 or so adventure travel companies they have taken over and I fear that in their push to increase profits, trips will become standardised packages and the ethos of genuine adventure travel will be lost. I shall be looking at some of the smaller adventure travel companies in future - they have not all been taken over.