I was planning to take a trip to Russia which was ruined by GoToRussia.com / Intergrand Travel. With their poor communication, unfriendly and unprofessional service, and fraudulent charges, they turned what was supposed to be an enjoyable vacation into a traumatic experience.
This was my first time attempting to travel abroad and I had a great deal of interest in seeing Russia and Ukraine. I found GoToRussia.com and, after verifying that there were not any major complaints or issues from other customers of this company, I contacted them to arrange to take a personalized guided tour. I received an email back from Lara Komolova at their Moscow offices.
I finally decided to tour Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kiev. The first thing I noticed was that anytime I asked more than one question in an email to Lara I would get an answer to only one of the questions I asked, and often it was not much of an answer. I had to ask the same questions several times over just to get an answer and when I asked if they could offer suggestions on how to pack or what to bring, the answers I got back were not very helpful.
Lara set up the Tour and sent me the documentation, which always seemed to be a cut and paste job from some pre-existing documents. They had me contact the California offices to get my plane tickets and when I asked about the Visa, the only information they offered was that they could send me the "Tourist Invitation Letter" once I sent copies of my passport.
I had made it clear in my communications that this was my first trip to Russia, but the Visa letter I received by email did not include any further instructions, nor did any of the other emails regarding the letter, so I assumed I needed to print it out and bring it with me. I only found out there was a problem when I got to Frankfurt International Airport and was told I couldn't get on the plane to Moscow because I was supposed to take the letter to the Russian consulate to get the actual visa.
I arrived in Frankfurt on a Sunday morning and was told I would need to go to Bonn, Germany so I could see about requesting the visa I needed from the Russian embassy there. The trip to Bonn was extremely traumatic. I stayed in Bonn overnight and the next day I found that the embassy was closed due to a Russian holiday. I couldn't afford to spend another night in Bonn so I returned to the airport and found out my luggage was sent to Moscow without me and I would have to pay $200 extra to change my tickets over so I could get back home.
When I finally got home, I checked GoToRussia.com and found that they offer a service, for a fee, where they take care of all the visa requirements. I had thought they were including this in the price of the tour but they did not, nor did they make this fact very clear. They never even offered this service to me, which I consider very unprofessional as I would have gladly paid for it. They could have made extra money offering their own services to their own customers but decided not to, which is just bad business. I paid for traveler's insurance through a different company because they never offered that service either, nor even made me aware that they offered it.
I contacted the company by email and received a response back basically saying it was my fault that I didn't ask about the visa requirements. They were laying blame on me because I didn't ask questions I didn't even know I needed to ask. Afterwards they wanted me to pay an additional $1100 for expedited visa service and another plane ticket if I wanted to try and continue with my trip, which I could not afford after losing my luggage and having to pay extra to get back home.
I filed a dispute with the credit card company for the cost of the tour package as a precaution and found that, though I had signed documents showing that I had only approved them to charge my credit card $4019 for the tour, they had charged me $4519 instead, $500 more than I approved. They indicated that the charge would show up in Roubles but all documentation showed the amounts in US Dollars, so this would not excuse them for charging the increased amount without authorization. On top of this, they did not want to refund the full price of the tour package due to fees accrued on the days I missed, when it was their fault I was not able to make it to Russia in the first place. If I had not filed the dispute, I probably would not have received a full refund.
Overall, this was a terrible experience that was only made worse after the fact. To anyone thinking about using GoToRussia.com, Intergrand Travel, or UkraineTrip.com I would recommend finding a better company and save yourself some grief.
0 comments