Shelter Tours

Stay away from this company. I would give 0 stars if the site allowed

First I want to state the good:
- Lucy, the owner will respond to all e-mail inquiries very promptly before you book (remember this later, all immediate responses only come before you book and for anything after you make payment you are on your own).
- The driver Cyrus in Maasai Mara is excellent. He is really friendly and will go out of the way so you have a good game drive.
- Remember we are in Africa here. It is just beautiful and like no other place you will see. With or without a bad safari tour, you can't miss the beauty and wildlife all around.

The bad:
- Pretty much everything else.
- We paid $1000 extra to fly from Maasai Mara to Serengeti to avoid a long drive and wasting time on our short trip. Not only did Lucy screw up the flight and we still had to do extremely long drives, but she waited to tell us after we had started the trip and had paid in full in cash. Had she told us beforehand, we would have canceled and gone with another alternative. She's either dishonest or incompetent and neither is a good reason to waste your money on this tour company.
- The trip is not quite 8 days as promised. Obviously we wasted a lot of time driving to make up for the lost flight from Kenya to Tanzania, but by day 6 you are pretty much done.
- The safari driver in Tanzania was really reluctant. We were mostly done with game drives after lunch and would go back by 2:30 or 3 when other people were still out on their game drives and late afternoon is the best time to see animals. The Tanzania part is not run by Shelter tours, they just get a local company to take you around.
- After the trip was unexpectedly changed on us, we repeatedly asked Lucy for the new itinerary and didn't get one until the trip was almost finished. We were basically at the mercy of the Tanzania driver.
- The worst part was that we had paid for Sopa and Serena lodges (3-4 star equivalent) throughout the trip, and because Lucy changed the itinerary, we ended up staying in a simply terrible place in Lake Manyara on the last day. In the original trip there was going to be no stay in Lake Manyara and this was Lucy's pleasant surprise for us. It looked like a rundown dilapidated building, we were the only guests there and the food was bad as in did not taste bad but spoiled. They do not seem to have any guests so they must keep refrigeration and stuff off. simply disgusting considering how much we had paid. Any decent tour operator would have refunded us for the flight ticket and the terrible Lake Manyara hotel that we never agreed to but not Lucy. She stopped answering our desperate e-mails on about day 4 and we just gave up. Someone needs to shut her down. No conscientious person would charge for a luxury tour and give you this kind of experience. I strongly suspect the one review on this site that says they are excellent was written by Lucy herself. We really felt cheated by the whole experience.