Hi! I have worked with tours by locals for about 6 year. In Italy the guide is a profession as in many other European states so this is literally my job with which I mantain my family. I was the most rated guide in florence and the one who had the highest number of tours in Florence. I had a list of about 140 feedbacks all of them were 5 stars, a few 4 stars and like 3 or 4 3 stars. They called my in september 2016 to make a you tube promotional video for them which I did with great pleasure.
Around April 2017 I got in contact with this guy, Gavin Mc Gee, who started to ask me about a feedback which did not appeared on my profile. It was a very general feedback of a customer I had 6 months before (!!) who said that I did not customize the tour enough for her kids. I didn’t even remember her. Gavin started to press me about that and aske me if I was willing to contribute to the refund. I said no, because the complaint was very general and anyhow they had the tour and it was 6 months ago!!!
Then came another time again Gavin with another feedback of a client who I had 8 months before. same thing. The customer argued we never saw a place which was never mentioned in the itinerary and said I was late, while I wasn’t!!! Same question: do you want to contribute? No I said. For obvious reasons: the complaints were fake!!!
Then I had a couple of 3 stars feedbacks, one from a customer for whom I had arranged 2 vans with drivers (cost 900€) and a tour in Florence with me cost 150€. The customer complained that I walked too fast. TBL in the person of Gavin Mc Gee asked me to contribute to the refund of 50% of the entire amount, so refunding also the cost of the driver!!! At that point after all this pressure I almost had a nervous breakdown 🙂 I told Gavin that I could give a refund of the total amount of the cost of MY TOUR only, even if I thought this was sinmply a way for the customer to have the tour free, but I cuold not certainly give the client the refund of the 2 drivers who I paid on their behalf and who did their job perfectly, since the customer was just criticizing MY TOUR, not the drivers!!
After this they put my account on hold and they transferred all my tours (AABOUT 6 fuLL DAY for a value of 1000€ roughly) to other guides without even asking me.
I am lucky that the guides in Florence knows me and so the next morning none of them accepted my tours.
I had a very unpleasant discussion at the phone with Gavin, who by the way continued to tell that this was their customer care policy.
I agree with who was saying above, that they are loosing the best guides with this approach and they do not respect our rights! Anyway I lost about 1000€ of work.
thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my experience
Elena