‘Disgruntled’ After Tour Of South Island By Bus

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30956, 12 January 1966, Page 12

‘Disgruntled’ After Tour Of South Island By Bus

An Auckland couple who returned to Christchurch yesterday at the end of a “grand” tour of the South Island which cost £175 10s from Christchurch to Christchurch and £250 in all from Auckland back home, were “disappointed,” and acted as spokesmen for the other 25 persons on their bus tour, who were “disgruntled.”

Mr and Mrs T. M. Sampson were two of four New Zealanders on the “grand” tour. The others were Australians, Americans, South Africans, and British tourists.

All, according to the Sampsons, were leaving the tour with some ill-feeling against the organisers and particularly the staff of the last hotel on their itinerary.

The itinerary was the first cause of the trouble, Mr and Mrs Sampson said last evening. When the tourists compared notes they found that there were several different versions of the itinerary.

They had been particularly interested in visiting Mount Cook and staying at the Hermitage, as had been promised in their “five-star-plus” tour, to quote an advertisement. So they said, were some of the other tourists, and many had arranged flights over the glaciers. These did not occur because the Hermitage was cut out of the itinerary.

The first they knew o’ this was an announcement on the bus in Christchurch just before it left for the West Coast, they said. Stay In Westport

On the first day of their 11day tour they stayed in Westport. The Sampsons were among three couples who were sent to a private house,

although their tickets were for hotel accommodation. Laiter,Mrs Sampson said, they found that there were vacant rooms in the hotel where they had their meals. All went well as the tour went down the Haast Pass road, into Southland and Otago and the lakes country; but then came Otematata. where they had been booked into the hotel instead of the Hermitage at Mount Cook as originally paid for. “One of the Australians sent back his chicken and black potatoes at dinner, and I don’t blame him, for none of us was particularly pleased with the meal,” Mrs Sampson said. “The chef then came into the dining-room and abused all of us.”

Breakfast the next morning was almost non-existent, except that they got plenty of toast, she said. Eventually they went on a day trip to Mount Cook and agreed that they should have dinner somewhere else if possible. That was at the Lake Tekapo Hotel.

When the tour party arrived back at Otematata there was an argument between the hotel manager and the chef on one side and the tourists and their bus driver on the other whether the door was locked or not. It ended, the Sampsons said, with thenbeing told there would be no breakfast for them in the morning, and neither there was. They had to go to Lake Tekapo on their way back to Christchurch to get any. Most of the tourists had been accommodated in huts outside the hotel building. These, Mrs Sampson said, might have been all right for single men in a camp, but were hardly all right for those who had paid for a “grand” tour.

“You don’t pay that amount of money to be cursed and sworn at,” Mrs Sampson add-

ed. Complaints Made In Christchurch there was a general complaint to the manager of the company organising the tour, they said, and eventually he promised a refund of £1 a head against the difference in staying at Otematata instead Of the Hermitage. Mr Sampson, who spent many years as head steward of Dominion Breweries, Ltd., before retiring recently, sought out Canterbury Hotel Association and Hotel Workers’ Union executives to complain yesterday. “We’re sorry for the overseas tourists," Mrs Sampson said. “Some of them have gone away with a very poor impression of New Zealand as a result, and one, an Australian journalist, said he would be writing about it so that thousands would know. We want to let the complaints be known here in the hope that others will not suffer.”