E-Trip Africa

Reply from E-Trip Africa

Thank you for taking the time to post your feedback and sharing about your experience. Let me start by apologizing that eTrip Africa was clearly not the right fit for you, due to your expectations from our guides which were not in line with our safety and security procedures and policies.

I do sincerely hope that both of you do value that you were able to accomplish a feat that many will never achieve, with one of you making it all the way to the summit and the other to Stella Point. I know you may feel that you have failed, but this is a huge success in itself.

As this is the first complaint that we have had, I would like to share some more information. We do have many clients that did not make it to the summit, but of them they all agreed that it was in the end the right choice not to proceed further. We have taken nearly 1,800 people up Kilimanjaro and more than half of them were over 50 years old. Older climbers are actually our preference as they go slow and don’t try to rush up the mountain like the 20 year olds…

Our company ethos places great importance on safety, which means that reaching the summit is not our measure of success but rather keeping our clients and crew safe is our first and foremost priority. Of course it can be frustrating and disappointing when you work hard and don’t reach the summit, but the reality is that not everyone makes it to the summit and sadly there are people every year who lose their lives on Kilimanjaro because the guide allows them to push too far.

We keep very detailed daily records on each of our clients. Twice daily medical checks are recorded along with general state of being of each climber. Further the guides report any and every incident no matter how large or small. Further we use InReach satellite trackers for each trek which allows our office to monitor the progress of the trek. It alerts us when a team is moving too fast, as this can be one of the biggest mistakes that can be made on Kili. Our guides know very well that the slower the pace the better our bodies adapt to altitude.

As I mentioned in our many emails back and forth immediately after you emailed us (before you posted this review), our team has gone through all the records and the InReach track in great detail. From the full review we concluded that the guide and assistant guide followed all policies and procedures correctly. When I told you this you were clearly not satisfied and requested to see our policies and procedures, which I shared with you. From that point we did not have further response from either of you.

Of course, without being on the mountain as an eye witness it is impossible to determine if there was a personality conflict between the two of you and the guide and assistant guide. We did also follow up on this assumption and spoke to several members of the crew and received the report from the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project monitoring porter as well. Of these the most we can ascertain is that there was never a bond made between the two of you and our team as the two of you kept to yourselves not communicating much with our team and speaking in Spanish between you most of of the trek. This not a problem, but I hope that you can understand if the guides seemed distant (or un-supportive as you put it), as they believed you did not need them in that way based on your limited interactions with them during the full trek. Needless to say we did not find any reason from our team nor any specific information from you that lead us to believe that the guide or assistant guide acted in an unprofessional manner towards either of you.

Lastly as I mentioned in our emails and you read in our policies, it is forbidden for our guides to carry, push or pull someone and allow that person to continue up the mountain. If someone is in need of such assistance, they must descend. It was reported in the guide log that at one point during the summit attempt it was requested by you to carry or pull one of you up the rest of the way to the summit. The guide and assistant guide refused due to safety issues. Again, I believe we were not the right match of a company based on your expectations and you would have been better off trekking with a company that does not take safety as serious as we do.

On the positive side I am glad you had a great safari with us after the trek. I wish you would have taken the time to include that as part of your review as most readers on this site are safari goers…