Consort Travel

Consort Travel, in South Yorkshire, have been in the business of taking UK customers on coach holidays to European destinations since 1984. Rather than booking through an agent, who takes a cut of the price of your holiday, you deal directly with Consort as the organiser of the tours. However, Consort don’t directly own any coaches. They contract out the coach operation to other companies, so in that sense they don’t have direct control over the ...
...evening in each destination. Consort describe the journey as relaxing.
- Last, but very importantly, the excursions (some included and some optional extras) were all to places which would have been on our itinerary had we flown to Naples and taken the train to Sorrento. The bonus was that one of the included excursions was to Rome, which we would have missed if we’d flown to Naples.

THE COACHES

All the coaches ... more

Consort Travel, in South Yorkshire, have been in the business of taking UK customers on coach holidays to European destinations since 1984. Rather than booking through an agent, who takes a cut of the price of your holiday, you deal directly with Consort as the organiser of the tours. However, Consort don’t directly own any coaches. They contract out the coach operation to other companies, so in that sense they don’t have direct control over the drivers or coaches. In common with many coach tour operators, Consort’s passengers board buses or minibuses at a variety of local pick-up points and are ferried to a central meeting point (Thurrock Services) where they are sorted onto the correct buses for their particular tour before heading to the ferry port at Dover. European destinations include the South of France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, the Adriatic Riviera, the Austrian Tyrol, Croatia, and Italy. Our destination was Sorrento in Italy, at £495 for 2 weeks in September, rising to £559 in July. The company also offers a small selection of tours in other parts of the world – California, the Canadian Rockies, New England, and New Zealand for prices ranging from £1200 to £2299. For those tours obviously you fly to your country of choice and continue by coach from there.

WHY WE CHOSE CONSORT

- The price seemed reasonable compared to flying to that part of Italy.
- My mobility problems restrict my ability to handle luggage, so getting picked up locally and not having to think about carrying luggage again till we got home seemed an ideal solution.
- The journey wasn’t all going to be done in one leg, but we would be staying overnight at hotels along the way there and back, with an evening in each destination. Consort describe the journey as relaxing.
- Last, but very importantly, the excursions (some included and some optional extras) were all to places which would have been on our itinerary had we flown to Naples and taken the train to Sorrento. The bonus was that one of the included excursions was to Rome, which we would have missed if we’d flown to Naples.

THE COACHES

All the coaches used by Consort have air conditioning, reclining seats, seat belts, onboard toilet, tinted windows, and a servery and fridge. The coach which took us from Glasgow to Thurrock was the smaller of the two we experienced, and the seats were less than capacious. It was spotlessly clean, and the toilet was a pleasure to use even after travelling from Glasgow to Thurrock. The larger coach, on which we spent the rest of the holiday, had more comfortable seating, but the toilet was nothing short of disgraceful. It was filthy. Fellow passengers who were on this coach from their pick-up point informed us the coach had set off with its toilet in this condition.

THE DRIVERS

Each coach has a two man team sharing the driving. The one not driving is responsible for looking after the passengers (serving drinks, making announcements, answering questions, etc), and making last minute arrangements with the hotels, guides, etc. Consort’s literature describes the driving team as “not so much a tour guide, as your friend on the coach”. Hmm. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your drivers. Had we had the choice, I would have been quite happy with 3 of the 4 drivers, but the 4th behaved very unprofessionally. Unfortunately, he was part of the team we had to spend most of our time with, and he took a particular dislike to us. It is unreasonable to expect to get on with everyone you meet when you are working with the public, but the professional thing to do in that situation is to treat the people with the same courtesy and respect in your professional capacity as you do everyone else. The unprofessional thing to do is to make inappropriate comments of a sexual nature (it was meant to be a joke of course!), badmouth the object of your dislike to other passengers, consistently ignore them when serving drinks on the coach, etc, etc. It was actually rather amusing watching him try to isolate us from the rest of the group. It was so pathetically transparent. We didn’t rise to it, as we didn’t wish to create any more of a hostile atmosphere for our fellow passengers, who were a sterling bunch of folks. To their credit they took not a blind bit of notice of his attempts, and we were actually rather popular in the group (she said, modestly).

In terms of actual driving, I couldn’t and wouldn’t fault any of our drivers. We always felt very safe, and they displayed a high degree of driving skill, particularly the one who treated us so badly in other respects. They were also very good at advising the passengers on security issues like when to leave valuables locked on the coach when there was a risk of mugging, or pickpockets were likely to be operating. They should however give some thought to informing passengers of local practices at service stations when they stop for breaks. They use the same ones all the time, so should know when it’s self-service, and when you have to pay first and take the sales slip to the counter to order drinks and food. It was very much left to the passengers to work this out though.

TRAVELLING

This was the worst aspect of the holiday, and unfortunately it was a big component. We expected the first day to be very long as we were being picked up in Glasgow at 2am and were due in our hotel in France in the evening. We knew we were going to be too late for an evening meal at the hotel, but we didn’t expect to get there at 10pm. The rest of our journey time consisted of rising between 6 and 6.45am and arriving at our next hotel after dark. We had been led to believe we would have evenings to see something of each destination along the journey to Sorrento, but the reality was we arrived in the dark with just enough time (and energy) to eat and get to bed. It was an exhausting schedule. Sitting down all day is very tiring, and often the intervals between break stops was ludicrously long, specially with the state of the onboard toilet! Service stations were a very mixed bag, with the food varying greatly in quality, as did the toilet facilities. Some of them were worse than the onboard toilet. The landscapes we passed through were very pretty, but you hardly felt you were experiencing it at all as it whizzed past the window. It was like watching it on TV, and the only bits you were actually able to engage with were service station car parks. We endured this from Tuesday till Friday on the outward journey, and Friday till Monday morning on the return journey. Relaxing, it wasn’t. In effect, we paid for a two-week holiday and had a one-week holiday.

HOTELS

The standard of the hotels was generally high, in terms of accommodation. On the first night they made a mistake with our room and gave us a double instead of a twin, but we were too tired to complain and just bunked in together. All the other rooms were fine. However, the set menus at the hotels en route to Sorrento caused a few problems. Personally, I always found something I could eat, even if I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but a few other passengers were very hungry by the time they got to Sorrento.

At the time of booking, we were asked to give our preference out of 3 hotels Consort use in the Sorrento area. Our choice was in Vico Equense, a small town just up the coast from Sorrento. However, the hotel we got was our last choice which was in the centre of Sorrento. Oddly, almost everyone we discussed this with among the passengers had also put Vico Equense as their first choice.

The hotel in Sorrento where we spent Friday to Friday was very comfortable, except that the air conditioning was off and we were woken by a build up of pollution from the busy road junction every morning. This also made the balcony virtually unusable though there was a table and chairs out there. The evening meals in the hotel were very good, and we were able to choose these from a limited menu at breakfast time each day. Breakfast was a basic continental affair, which was fine for me, but others were pretty sick of it by the end of the week. On balance, we were pleased with the hotel, and the staff were a joy.

EXCURSIONS

The price of the holiday included 2 excursions. One was to Rome on the outward journey to Sorrento, and the other was to Florence on the return journey. All other excursions were optional and there was an extra charge for these. On the included excursions you could either pay extra for the services of a guide organised by Consort, or do your own thing. In other words, the excursion was included because the coach was going there anyway.

We were looking forward particularly to Rome. All tour buses entering Rome have to park in the coach park under Vatican City. The bits of Rome we were particularly interested in were the Colosseum, Spanish Steps, the Forum, the Trevi fountain, all of which are a good stretch of the legs or a taxi ride from Vatican City. Not a problem, as we were meant to be having 4 hours at leisure in Rome. Except, as we were driving into the city we were informed we were having 2 hours in Rome. Having already bought a map and planned our route, we had to abandon our plans and ended up hanging about for 2 hours round Vatican City, which was interesting enough but not what we went to Rome to see. We eventually saw the Colosseum, Forum, etc, from the bus window on our way out of Rome.

This experience prompted us to opt out of the optional excursions, and we were very glad to have made that decision. We saw everything the rest of the tour did, but doing it independantly meant we saw more of it, at our own pace, and for much, much less money. The excursion prices seem terribly inflated to me, though Consort deny this.

Consort’s literature makes it clear that you are at liberty to do your own thing if you want to. However, we both had a strong suspicion that our opting out of all but one of the excursions had a lot to do with us falling foul of one of the drivers. He seemed to take it personally that we were independantly going to the same places as the excursions. His treatment of us deteriorated dramatically on arrival in Sorrento. Perhaps it was just coincidence that we had to hand our optional excursion booking forms in then.

DEALING WITH CONSORT

We booked through the catalogue, by mail. We got our final arrangements through the post approximately 10 days before departure, and when my travelling companion phoned Consort to clarify something about luggage arrangements (specifically whether my camera backpack could be accommodated inside the coach or would have to be inside my case) the woman who answered said bluntly that she had no idea, and made no offer to find out.

When we got back to Glasgow, we wrote to Consort to complain about the unprofessional behaviour of one of their drivers, and the things that hadn’t lived up to the promises in their literature. They wrote back, after their “investigation” of the events, expressing regret that we had been dissatisfied, but denying they had any case to answer.

VERDICT

Well, I certainly won’t travel with Consort again, but to be fair to them I won’t be going on any coach holidays with other companies either, and they have many repeat customers. Many of the passengers were very elderly (some of the old ladies were an absolute hoot), and some travelling alone, so the security of the group and having everything organised would have been a big part in their decision to take this type of holiday. Maybe I’m just not Consort’s type of traveller. I’ll leave you to decide whether you are.
 

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