Colleen_G, sep. 2023
Firstly, our experience with using Viator has been great (a few tours) and I’d also recommend kayaking around Dubvronik as it was absolutely beautiful! Our poor review is strictly because of our tour guide, probably the only really bad/rude one I’ve ever experienced anywhere!! I’ve traveled a lot in my 50 years and have been on many tours & adventures! We are also fairly easy to please people and I have almost never complained about any type of service in my life, even when not good. Our most recent experience was ziplining in Omis Croatia a few days earlier and happily gave that 5 stars.
X Adventures has many great reviews so maybe we just got them on a bad day, I don’t know.
Communication wasn’t what I’ve experienced on other tours (no response to an emailed question) but we figured out everything we needed so that was fine. The day started extremely unorganized. We found the correct meeting place and were there exactly on time, 8:40am for our 9am excursion. No one was at the X Adventures stand…..that was ok but by 8:50 we were starting to worry we were at the wrong spot. There was another couple also waiting for them. I showed our instructions & meeting place to another kayaking company (there r several who meet at the same location, a beautiful little bay!) and they assured me that we were at the correct spot but that X Adventures does have another meeting place. Around 9 or maybe 2-3 minutes before, a guy did come and find us and walked us to another location. Everything seemed unorganized, they didn’t really say anything and never once took our names, info or did any kind of waiver. We didn’t really care, although I’m not sure how they know if it’s just random unbooked people showing up!! All said & done I’m not sure how late we got going but I think we were in kayaks on the water a bit past 9:30am, maybe 9:40.
Started kayaking, it is a seriously gorgeous area and we lucked out with great weather. I was with my 20 year old daughter and we were the only all female kayak (double kayaks…. We had 10 people in our group, so 5 kayaks. There were another 5-6 kayaks with another X Adventures guide) I mention this because clearly there is a strength difference and I wouldn’t be as strong as all the young men in the other kayaks (in their 20’s & 30’s). I’m in no means out of shape and am active, workout and am actually in decent shape. If you r familiar with Santorini, two days prior I walked up the steps from the ship to to the shops in 34 degree heat in 18 minutes, passing many people much younger than myself. I also kayak on a lake in Canada - a single kayak, so it’s a bit different….but I’m able to kayak!! My 20 year old daughter is also healthy and in decent shape. But we were slower than the other pairs and fell slightly behind. Our guide (I believe his name was Edin) never even turned around or looked to see if we were still with the group. Eventually, after the stop at the first cave and before the beach, we fell a bit further behind and couldn’t tell where our group was anymore. There were many kayaks, many groups on the water! As we approached the beach we didn’t know if our group was even there or if they were the kayaks that were heading back to Old Town. So we spent 3 minutes looking at a small cave beside the beach and then sort of floated in front of the beach (probably 50-60 other kayaks there, either on the water or on the small beach) Edin saw us at that point and started waving frantically from shore. We paddled up to him and explained that we had no idea where our group was for the previous 10 minutes. He ignored that and said we could pull the kayaks to shore and get out there. I asked if we had to go to shore and he very rudely replied “well you don’t HAVE to”. I then asked how long it would be before we’d be back at the meeting place because we were on a cruise and couldn’t be too much past the scheduled time of 12 noon. He said half an hour at the beach and then half an hour kayak back- and he then went to shore as we hung out on the water in our kayak. He did shout “don’t go too far” as he walked back to shore. It was 11:40am at this point. We were supposed to meet family at 12-12:10 and had brief plans before having to make our way to our cruise ship at 1pm. So I was getting worried about the time. Edin appeared to be having a blast jumping off rocks, swimming, having people take his picture etc. I have no problem with a tour guide joining in activities & having fun, but he appeared to only be there for this reason, not to actually work. And he was clearly annoyed that we were a bit slower than the rest of our group. Can’t imagine if he had guests that were super slow and out of shape. This excursion is a moderate workout, nothing extreme -but not super light as it’s 3plus hours and the majority of the time is actually kayaking!
By shortly after noon I finally told my daughter that we had to head back. Edin was still having a jolly ol time jumping in the water by himself and it would have been a pain to manoeuvre through many other kayakers, get to shore and try to get his attention. He also didn’t seem to be a kind person or care -and I can guarantee would have just said we need to wait a bit longer. Well at this point I knew we’d be at least 40-45 minutes late meeting family and we were starting to be at risk of missing our cruise (they leave u behind if u r late!!) We were supposed to be done at 12 noon and when I booked this excursion I thought we’d be ok as I figured we’d be fine up to about 12:30 if necessary - and I’ve honestly never been on a tour that is not somewhere between slightly early to maybe 10-15 minutes late max. In spite of Edin being rude and snappy to me and not even noticing that we were behind the group, we were not at all rude to him. However, we did leave at this point. Although his group instructions never discussed this (aside from calling out “don’t go too far” 20-25 minutes earlier) , common sense says that no one should ever leave their group. I understand and would normally respect that - but given Edin’s lack of interest and rudeness… as well as the fact that I was not going to risk missing our ship, we did leave. On our way back we passed many other kayaks and realized that we weren’t even that slow …. We certainly passed a number of kayaks that had two females much younger than myself. We looked behind many times and are quite sure that our group had not left for a long time after we did (they were nowhere in sight and as i said, faster than us) They were definitely at the beach more than 30 minutes in total. We arrived back at 12:35-12:40pm (took about 30-35 minutes from the beach, water was rougher by now) and luckily someone from X Adventures was there to help & to pull our kayaks in. We were very late meeting family, skipped our plans but walked around Old Town for 10-15 minutes (just to see it, really wish we had more time as it’s lovely!) and made our way back to the ship with about 15-20 minutes to spare. Had we waited for our group we might have made it, but not sure - it would have been close! Our kayak group would have been at least 15 minutes behind us and likely more. And we would have obviously been a bit behind them again! So the tour started late and ended at least 50, but probably closer to 60 minutes late.
Again, definitely recommend kayaking around Dubvronik, just not with this company or at least this guide. Perhaps if you are very fast and strong you might be ok with Edin! And also have a flexible schedule with plenty of time!
I apologize for the length of this review….. I detailed it in case the owner of X Adventures is interested in our exact experience. It’s accurate and honest…. based on other reviews I suppose we just got unlucky with this particular guide or the particular day.