One question we are frequently asked by travellers considering booking with Convoy Tours is:
Why do you take payment in advance for your tours?
Other tour operators will allow you to pay cash on the day, or perhaps take a small deposit in advance. Convoy Tours asks for 100% payment in advance.
Why?
It’s a valid question. Allow me to explain.
First and foremost, Convoy Tours is a small tour operator. We’re not competing with the big boys. This is really a labour of love for us. We have a couple of guides who work exceptionally hard and provide world-class service to every customer, every time.
That’s our commitment to you.
If we take your booking, we will be there at the right place, at the right time, on the right day.
The problem is what happens when someone cancels at the last minute.
Every time I have allowed someone to convince me to take a deposit, or accept cash on the day, there has eventually been a problem. We get a late cancellation, usually too late for us to resell the day. That’s not fair on the people we may have turned away because we had already committed the day to you. And our guide, who has a family and commitments, loses a day’s work.
So it’s a big loss for us.
And the downside for the person who cancelled?
Usually, nothing.
We take 100% of the downside and none of the upside.
I completely understand, though, that from a client’s perspective, paying 100% in advance can feel uncomfortable. That’s why we make our own commitment in return.
If you need to cancel, we will refund you 100% as long as you give us at least 24 hours’ notice.
Life happens. I live in the real world too. Things go wrong, plans change and sometimes you simply need to reschedule.
If you want to move your tour to another day, we will do our best to accommodate you. If you need to cancel, we will refund you in full, provided you give us the required notice.
If you cancel within 24 hours, we charge a 20% cancellation fee. That money goes directly to the guide. It doesn’t benefit me.
There is a reason we have become so strict about this.
A while back, we had a particularly unpleasant experience. A lady told me that her PayPal wasn’t working and convinced me to accept payment in cash on the day.
That should have been a red flag. I was a little naive.
We completed the tour, dropped her back at her guest house and she went inside to get the cash.
She didn’t come back out.
The guide knocked on the door. The guest house owner was extremely rude and aggressive and told us that she wasn’t coming out because she didn’t feel well. He instructed us to leave.
The guide called me. I told him to leave and take the dignified approach.
He drove home, and I paid him in full for the exceptional service he had provided.
It was a very unpleasant experience.
We licked our wounds, but we learned from it.
And unfortunately, that sort of thing can only happen once.
So now, payment in advance is pretty much non-negotiable.
We take payment in advance because we are committing our time, our guide’s time and our resources to you. In return, we give you the security of knowing that if your plans change and you give us at least 24 hours’ notice, you will receive a full refund.
That seems fair to me.
It’s fair to you. It’s fair to us. And nobody gets hurt.
That’s really the reason.
We’re just a small company. Convoy Tours isn’t trying to compete with the big boys. We do what we do, we try to do it to the best of our ability, and we do it with a lot of care.
We hope you understand why we work this way and can get behind it.
But if you don’t, that’s absolutely fine too.
There are probably 400 tour operators in Cape Town, so you certainly won’t struggle to find someone who does things differently.
We just do things our way.
