About a year ago, Jim M. posted:
Birdquest Tour Leader Evaluations
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Was hoping some here might have experience with the following Birdquest tour leaders, and be willing to share their impressions of their leadership styles. (I find the Birdquest website unhelpful in this regard). I’m less interested in birding skills (which I expect are very good or better for all) than people skills, pleasantness, ability to manage groups effectively, being respectful and considerate of participants, and having an interest in wildlife other than birds.
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Having just returned from a Birdquest Tour from Hell in Costa Rica, and this being about the only thing I can find online regarding Birdquest evaluations, I was heartened to find that at least one person in the world (notably from my side of the Atlantic) thought that there were other criteria which should be considered in evaluating tour guides.
What I was first interested in, having been deprived in those areas, was being allowed time to sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. (We did pay for fairly good quality hotels and meals, leading me to assume we’d be able to sleep in the hotels and eat the meals.) We began very early every single morning, which would have been okay if we’d been able to go to bed early, but tour activities were scheduled well into the evening. The best I could manage was 6 hours of sleep a night, 5 if I got up for the earliest activity. Tour demands on either or both sides of some meals either prohibited eating them at all or wolfing down whatever you could. And, on one occasion, even though a stop at a restaurant was necessary to drop someone off, a bathroom break was quite some time farther away. When I informed the tour leader that I’d need to go to the bathroom sooner than that, he told me to go in the woods! (Might not be so difficult for those of the male sex, but it’s considerably more complicated for those of us who are not.) And on one occasion the tour guide and every other single member of the tour just went off and left me alone on a trail in a cloud forest in a foreign land. I can only remember one time when we had 2 hours of free time in the middle of the day, even though we were often promised it.
In addition, I’d have to say that the tour guide was sometimes helpful to the participants in finding birds and looking at them through the scope, or taking photos of them with their own cameras, at other times he wasn’t. He was downright distasteful of quetzals and macaws, and of people who wanted to see them. There were birds I wanted to see, in some cases had never seen before, that we passed before I got a change to get a good view of them. I think I’d have to say that the main purpose of the tour seemed to be checking as many boxes off on the checklist as possible, and in many cases all that involved was one tour participant saying he’d gotten a very quick glimpse of a bird. It certainly did not mean that all or even most participants saw it, or even that one person got a good view of it.
I have discussed all these problems with both the tour leader and the Birdquest office, and it seems that I am the only person in the history of the world to ever voice a single complaint, and that “that’s what all bird tours do.” Now, I’ve been birding for decades in the U.S., and I’ve never found birders or birding to be that extreme and obsessive, and I've always found tour guides to be more consistently helpful. Since this was my first encounter with birders from the U.K., I couldn’t speak to their proclivities.
I do think that Birdquest needs to be held accountable, have some limits put on their behavior and how it affects others, or, at least, that future victims be warned about them. After the first week of this, it had become intolerable. I was exhausted, stressed out, not seeing the birds I wanted to see, or enjoying anything. I dropped out of the tour I had paid about $5,400 for (not including airfare, trip insurance, and other necessary expenses) and made arrangements to go back to San José and do some fun stuff while I still had a little vacation time left. Of course, the kindhearted folks at Birdquest are refusing to give me any refund, just because they don’t give refunds.
All I can say is “LET THE BUYER BEWARE!”
Birdquest Tour Leader Evaluations
________________________________________
Was hoping some here might have experience with the following Birdquest tour leaders, and be willing to share their impressions of their leadership styles. (I find the Birdquest website unhelpful in this regard). I’m less interested in birding skills (which I expect are very good or better for all) than people skills, pleasantness, ability to manage groups effectively, being respectful and considerate of participants, and having an interest in wildlife other than birds.
_____________________
Having just returned from a Birdquest Tour from Hell in Costa Rica, and this being about the only thing I can find online regarding Birdquest evaluations, I was heartened to find that at least one person in the world (notably from my side of the Atlantic) thought that there were other criteria which should be considered in evaluating tour guides.
What I was first interested in, having been deprived in those areas, was being allowed time to sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. (We did pay for fairly good quality hotels and meals, leading me to assume we’d be able to sleep in the hotels and eat the meals.) We began very early every single morning, which would have been okay if we’d been able to go to bed early, but tour activities were scheduled well into the evening. The best I could manage was 6 hours of sleep a night, 5 if I got up for the earliest activity. Tour demands on either or both sides of some meals either prohibited eating them at all or wolfing down whatever you could. And, on one occasion, even though a stop at a restaurant was necessary to drop someone off, a bathroom break was quite some time farther away. When I informed the tour leader that I’d need to go to the bathroom sooner than that, he told me to go in the woods! (Might not be so difficult for those of the male sex, but it’s considerably more complicated for those of us who are not.) And on one occasion the tour guide and every other single member of the tour just went off and left me alone on a trail in a cloud forest in a foreign land. I can only remember one time when we had 2 hours of free time in the middle of the day, even though we were often promised it.
In addition, I’d have to say that the tour guide was sometimes helpful to the participants in finding birds and looking at them through the scope, or taking photos of them with their own cameras, at other times he wasn’t. He was downright distasteful of quetzals and macaws, and of people who wanted to see them. There were birds I wanted to see, in some cases had never seen before, that we passed before I got a change to get a good view of them. I think I’d have to say that the main purpose of the tour seemed to be checking as many boxes off on the checklist as possible, and in many cases all that involved was one tour participant saying he’d gotten a very quick glimpse of a bird. It certainly did not mean that all or even most participants saw it, or even that one person got a good view of it.
I have discussed all these problems with both the tour leader and the Birdquest office, and it seems that I am the only person in the history of the world to ever voice a single complaint, and that “that’s what all bird tours do.” Now, I’ve been birding for decades in the U.S., and I’ve never found birders or birding to be that extreme and obsessive, and I've always found tour guides to be more consistently helpful. Since this was my first encounter with birders from the U.K., I couldn’t speak to their proclivities.
I do think that Birdquest needs to be held accountable, have some limits put on their behavior and how it affects others, or, at least, that future victims be warned about them. After the first week of this, it had become intolerable. I was exhausted, stressed out, not seeing the birds I wanted to see, or enjoying anything. I dropped out of the tour I had paid about $5,400 for (not including airfare, trip insurance, and other necessary expenses) and made arrangements to go back to San José and do some fun stuff while I still had a little vacation time left. Of course, the kindhearted folks at Birdquest are refusing to give me any refund, just because they don’t give refunds.
All I can say is “LET THE BUYER BEWARE!”