Half-Day Bali Tour to Explore Denpasar City

Disappointed

To begin with, I’d like to say that the actual places that I got to visit were interesting. My disappointment wasn’t with the places but rather with my guide. I want to make it clear that my guide was very nice. Very friendly but I don’t think he’s necessarily cut out to be a guide, maybe more of a driver. The first thing I’d like to mention is that I had a full day tour the day before with another Guide by the name of Guna. This man was incredible. Not only was he friendly and super passionate about his job and his culture and wanting to share that with people but he was so knowledgeable and he kept talking to me the entire time we were together. Laughing, entertaining with the best attitude ever. My experience with this next person was the opposite. With the exception of a couple of questions in the car on the way to begin our tour we pretty much sat in silence so I found myself trying to ask him questions and talk to him just to get him to interact with me. In part I think it was a bit of a language barrier but he didn’t really talk to me that much about where we were going or what we were doing so I actually felt a little awkward walking with him in silence as we approached the first museum. He stayed near me but kinda kept to himself looking at some things but not with me to talk to me about what this place was or explain anything reall. So I was quite disappointed about that. We then went to the market which was so excited about. It was what I actually wanted to see the most on this trip because everything else I was going to see I will be visiting later or have already seen. So we arrived at the market and once we got out of the car he just kind of walked off ahead of me and never looked back to see if I was ok or even still there. I saw an opening for the market, thinking we were gonna walk into it, but I noticed him some slow down finally being next to me and kind of felt like he was expecting me to sort of take a little bit and so I was a little confused because I thought we were going into the market to take a look at it But when we didn’t, I figured I would just take a look around outside the market first. I finally turned to him and said so this is the market and he said yes, and he explained to me a couple of things about it and then I looked at him and I just said well do we get to go in and he looked at me as if he was surprised and said “ oh you wanna go in?” And I said to him “well isn’t that part of the tour?” And you said yes, but the people are gonna try to make you buy things and I said I don’t care I wanna go in so he said OK but by then I was already quite frustrated cause I felt like I was forcing him to do this with me. I went in and pretty much left a couple of mins after cause I just didn’t see the point. I knew he wasn’t gonna talk to me about the market or anything else so at that point, I just decided to just get this done and over with so I said I was ready to go. We moved onto the next spot. This is where I got angry. We were approached by some men who asked me if I wanted information about the place that we were going to and when I wasn’t quite sure that I understood him properly. I turned to my guide and asked him what the man had said to me. He told me that he was wanting to give us a tour and that all I have to do is pay 50,000 IDR. My guide never even reacted to this. You just looked at me and asked me what I wanted to do and I looked at him and disbelief expecting him to just tell the man to leave us alone. I just looked at him and said well, what do you think? Do you think I should pay him to take me around and he just looked at me I said well what do you think and he just said something in Balinese to the man and that person left. The same thing happened at the next spot right after I just couldn’t believe what was going on.. and then the last part of it that kind of frustrated me was that the last place we visited it felt like he was the tourist because he was going around taking pictures with his phone, walking ahead of me and even taking pictures of me with his phone asking me to pose. I was very confused by this. Anyway, I finished my trip with him and when he dropped me off he asked me for a 5 star review. I said I would and then I walked away. I couldn’t give him 5 stars cause I personally think it would be wrong to do that. I initially figured that I wouldn’t even write a review because as much as I felt let down and just frustrated with my experience, I don’t think my guide is a bad person and I didn’t want to write anything bad about him. However after talking about it with a couple of friends they convinced me to do this review because they said people should know. I won’t put his name here but I will at least voice my opinion on my experience with him.

Response from the operator: Dear Joy, Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback on Viator. We're sorry to hear that our driver service didn't meet your expectations during the tour. Our driver/guide is relatively new, and we'll make sure to remind him to be more informative and provide better guidance to our guests. Thank you again for your feedback, and we hope to have the opportunity to serve you better in the future.

via Viator