Initial purchase
On March 22, 2022, we received an email from TravelZoo.com advertising a travel package called “Thailand & China: 10 Nights for $399 incl. Air” through UTOvacation. When we clicked through to UTOvacation’s site, we were impressed with the price and decided to purchase the deal for ourselves (Curtis & Sarah Gibby) and for another couple with whom we travel frequently (Brad & Debbie Welch).
The next day, March 23, we made a down payment of $592.00 for the four packages, and scheduled our travel for October 26 — November 6, 2022. The order number that was created in UTOvacation’s system with this sale was 38163. Between the initial purchase date and April 10, 2022, we made three additional payments to pay off the balance, bringing the total that we paid to UTOvacation to a whopping $4,588.00. (You will note that this equates to $1,147 per person, far greater than the originally advertised $399/person. This was the result of various nickel-and-dime add-ons, including meal packages and excursions.)
Signs of trouble
On April 4, 2022, we chatted with a customer service agent “Isaac” asking about COVID-related quarantines in China. He told us: “Since it’s still a few months away from your trip in October, we’re monitoring the situation. You will receive a travel update from us in 5 months before the trip. If the travel restriction continues, you may reschedule the trip to a later departure date or take a travel credit for other packages.”
The next day, April 5, we started another chat, again with “Isaac,” asking if they currently had tours in China. He responded, “Our next departures for China will be in October, and we anticipate that there will be limited or no travel restrictions in the future as more and more countries are reopening.”
First cancellation and postponement
On June 2, 2022, we got an email from “Becky” at UTOvacation, informing us that the Chinese government “insists on the Zero Covid Policy which makes the international travel almost impossible as of today.” She further wrote, “we advise you to transfer your initial payments to future travel credits by June 15, 2022.”
Five days later, on June 7, we once again chatted, this time with both “Brian” and “Isaac”. We referenced the email from “Becky” and asked for clarification on next steps. “Brian” advised, “As China is not ready to open up its border, we ask you to please reschedule or change to a different destination.” We asked for our money back instead, because all of their other trips were way more expensive than what we’d already paid for the Thailand/China trip.
“Brian” suggested that we send an email to schedule@utovacation.com to request the refund. When we pushed back, he transferred us to “Isaac” again, who let us know that “the deposits and early bird specials are non-refundable for the package.” We responded, “I find that unacceptable. You are the ones who are changing the original deal, so we should be able to cancel without penalty.” Isaac promised to “submit a request to the supervisor and get back to you by email” within 3-4 business days.
Two weeks later, on June 21, 2022, we chatted with them again, once again being transferred to “Isaac”. When we asked to talk to a supervisor, all of a sudden he got a response about our case: “You may reschedule to October 30, 2023 for the same package at the same price. If you really want to cancel, you will receive a refund of $648 per person. (The deposits of $399 per person are non-refundable and there is a cancellation fee of $100 per person for the value pack special.)”
We once again reiterated that a partial refund would be unacceptable, and Isaac repeated his suggestion that we reschedule to October 2023. At this point, we were frustrated with the company and its customer service agents, but agreed to postpone the trip. Isaac sent us an invoice showing the trip paid in full for travel between October 30 — November 10, 2023.
More trouble (and more fees?!)
We didn’t hear anything from UTOvacation about this trip again until February 16, 2023, when “Becky” sent an “urgent” email, letting us know that “China has reopened to tourists! We are overjoyed to (finally) take you on this adventure!” This email demanded a response within 10 days about whether we were still planning to take the trip, despite the fact that we’d never indicated any doubt about taking the trip for that scheduled date.
Becky’s email also included some vague warnings about possibly needing Chinese visas and introduced the idea of “mandatory tips” for the first time. There was an option to “request a refund,” but it included no details about the refund restrictions that we’d previously gotten from Isaac (which we presume were still in effect).
We went through several more fruitless rounds of emails and chats with surly and unhelpful agents. On February 18, 2023, we emailed info@utovacation the following:
I am frustrated by the fact that you’re asking us to make a decision based on context we do not have. I apologize for yelling at your phone agents, because their lack of knowledge is not their fault. In my opinion, you should have trained them on these details before you sent a vaguely-worded email. I understand that travel is just reopening in China and things are in flux right now, so you might not have all of the answers. With that said, you’ve got way more background in how these things work than I do. I’ve never been to China, whereas you’ve arranged dozens or hundreds of trips there. (I hope you have, anyway!) […] I asked the two support agents who spoke to me yesterday to have a manager contact me. At the end of your work day, I got a text saying basically, “Sorry, we weren’t able to help you today. Call us again later!” I took this to mean, “You’re not important enough for our managers to actually follow up with you, so we’ll send you back to tier 1 (who can’t actually help you).”
After a few more calls, we finally got some answers about the visas and tips, which we detailed in an email to our traveling companions on February 28, 2023:
- Regarding visas, the woman I talked to today was confident that we would be in China for less than 144 hours, so we won’t need to buy a visa.
- She told me that the $300 pp “service fee” and mandatory tips was not included in the price that we previously paid
This was the first time we’d heard anything about service fees that hadn’t been paid. Regardless, because we had sunk so much time and money into this company, we determined that we were willing to continue with the trip as scheduled.
Second cancellation
On July 14, 2023, “Becky” from UTOvacation sent another “Urgent” update, explaining that “the Travel Advisory has classified travel to China as level 3”, which we took to mean that the State Department officially discouraged us from going to China. However, UTOvacation’s position per the email was that “UTOvacation acknowledges the concerns expressed by customers regarding the current situation and would like to provide reassurance that their scheduled tours will proceed as initially planned.”
After discussing our options, we called UTOvacation’s customer service agents on July 17, 2023, once asking for a full refund. As always, they refused and advised us to send an email to “rebook@utovacation.com” requesting that they cancel our original order and asking for future travel credit. We did so, and they provided credit for the full value of $4,588.
We started looking for other trips to only Thailand through UTO, but they were all significantly more than we had originally purchased, with base prices (not including nickel-and-dime extras) around $2,200 per person. This meant that in order to get any kind of vacation similar to what we’d originally paid for in good faith, we’d have to lay out an additional $1,053 per person (plus whatever the extras would end up being).
A New Trip (with additional costs)
On September 4, 2023, we decided to use our existing credit for UTO’s “Spiritual India Tour 9 Days” trip, which had a base rate of $1,099 per person (but also added $290 per person for “compulsory tipping”, as well as additional costs for more excursions). The travel dates for this purchase were March 3 — March 11, 2025, and the order number was 56278. All totaled, this trip would cost a total of $5,556 for four people, or $968 more than the credit we had from UTO. We agreed to pay the difference within 180 days of the scheduled travel, and eagerly awaited our trip more than 18 months in the future (and more than three years after we’d originally purchased our first China trip).
The email that we got from UTO with this order mentioned the general 180-day deadline for payment, but did not explicitly call out the due date of this final payment.
Cancelled again!?!
We heard nothing more from UTOvacation until September 6, 2024, when we got an “Important Message” from a generic no-reply email address. It said that “your travel package order is suspended due to a lack of payment” and “Payment reminder emails were sent 190 and 180 [sic] prior to departure”. Notably, we did not receive any communication at 190 days (August 25, 2024) or 180 days (September 4, 2024); if we had, we would logged in to their site to pay that balance. For UTOvacation to automatically cancel our order without any prior communication is not an acceptable business practice in our minds.
Once again, we got onto UTOvacation’s chat on September 9, 2024, where we asked why they would drop us from the tour instead of contacting us, and let them know that we had not received any reminder emails. The customer service agent “Anna” helpfully informed us in broken English, “Sorry, the invoice is very clear shows your final payment due date”. (In fact, the invoice that we had gotten from them did NOT clearly show the payment due date.) When she asked if we’d like to still go on the tour, we responded that of course we would. “Anna” then brought up the idea of a “late payment surcharge” for a laughable amount of $799 per person.
While we were conferring among ourselves, “Anna” dropped us from the chat and we had to reconnect to talk to “Kim”. We told her that we would not pay an additional fee to go on a trip that we’d scheduled more than a year previously. We asked to speak to a supervisor who could help resolve the issue. We soon got a call from a woman whose name we did not take down, and whose demeanor was confrontational and rude. She bluntly reiterated what the previous customer service agents had told us: we could not continue on the scheduled trip without paying their ridiculous added fee, we could not get our money back, and nobody at the company would accommodate any of our requests, so stop wasting their time by asking. She told us to give them our decision by the next day, and hung up.
That evening, we discussed with our group whether we should pony up the extra $3,196. Because the current price of that trip on UTOvacation’s web site was now more than $10,000 per person, in classic “sunk cost fallacy” style, we tentatively agreed to do so the next day to at least salvage what we could from our credits.
A wake-up call
On a whim that night, one member of our group decided to Google customer reviews for UTOvacation, which we had never done before. The results were both shocking and predictable. From TripAdvisor to Better Business Bureau to TikTok, hundreds of other customers had terrible experiences that were eerily familiar to ours. We were surprised to find that the company wasn’t even accredited with the Better Business Bureau.
The reviews told of UTOvacation introducing delays and cancellations, dropping people from trips for supposed non-payment and other bogus excuses, offering credits that were now worth pennies on the dollar compared to current travel costs, using bait-and-switch tactics, and generally behaving deceptively and unethically. Disgruntled customers had even formed a Reddit group called /r/UTOvacationvictims, where people discussed forming a class-action lawsuit against UTOvacation. In short, the company was a fraud, a scam, and should be avoided at all costs.
The online reviews made us realize that we hadn’t just had bad luck in bumping up against edge cases in UTOvacation’s policies. The way that they treated us was the way that they treated everyone. Our experience was straight out of their playbook, the very core of their business model. We vowed at that moment to never give UTOvacation a single penny more, and to fight to get all of our money back.
The Current Policy
As of September 14, 2024, UTOvacation has the following notice on its web site:
From March 30 2020 to March 31, 2023 the government of Ontario changed the rules for travel agents like UtoVacation to allow them to elect to provide a travel credit to customers when a travel supplier failed to provide their services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March 31, 2023, the government has removed this rule and now UtoVacation is bound by the pre-pandemic rule of providing customers the choice of
- travel credit that is acceptable to the customer for future redemption towards travel services,
- comparable alternative travel services that are acceptable to the customer, or
- full reimbursement
when a travel supplier fails to provide the customers travel services.
(Travel credits are not cashable or exchangeable for a refund regardless or whether they were issued prior to March 31, 2023 or afterwards.)
To us, the language of the rule says that we must have the choice of any of those options. In every interaction with UTOvacation’s customer service team, we have asked for option 3 (a full refund) and were denied. Option 2 is not available, because they don’t allow us to directly book a comparable vacation.
The last parenthetical sentence seems to be a sleazy loophole to attempt to allow them to get out of actually offering customers options 2 or 3, and forcing people to take option 1. In that scenario, purchasing a new trip would now cost thousands of dollars more than our existing credits to cover a single person, let alone four people. We were essentially forced to take credits that are now basically useless.
Taking a stand
In our view, everything that UTOvacation has done with regard to our purchases has been ethically indefensible while technically adhering to its terms of service. We have spent dozens of frustrating hours trying to get through to antagonistic customer service agents, who have refused to budge on the company’s policies in any way.
At the time that it was happening, every interaction was frustrating, but spread out over two and a half years, the negative impacts were cushioned just enough to keep us on the line. Now, after spending multiple hours compiling this whole saga, we are struck with the sheer magnitude of bad business practices that we’ve tolerated, and astonished that we were potentially willing to give UTOvacation even more money. We don’t believe that UTOvacation has ever done anything with the intention of sending us to Thailand, China, or India, and has in fact done everything in its power to prevent that from happening while fighting tooth and nail to keep our money.
The Travel Industry Council of Ontario (TICO) has supervisory power over UTOvacation, which proudly lists its TICO affiliation on every page on its web site to give it a veneer of authenticity. We believe that TICO should force UTOvacation to cease business to prevent any further harm to consumers, unless it abandons its current customer-hostile business practices and begins to operate ethically. TICO should also force UTOvacation to refund all customers for any trips that have been cancelled or delayed.
Further, we ask that TravelZoo cut ties with UTOvacation, since TravelZoo’s endorsement gives UTOvacation a semblance of credibility that it in no way deserves.
In our specific case, we call for TICO to require that UTOvacation fulfill the letter and spirit of the current government mandate to allow us to choose a full refund of every penny that we have given it. We refuse to remain victims of UTOvacation’s fraudulent business practices, and demand justice for ourselves and other consumers. We request that TICO contact us as soon as possible concerning this matter via phone at 1-801-706-6971 or over email at cgibby@gmail.com.