Rather Disappointing Trip
by Diana Tay
Departure in November 2019
Antarctic is extremely beautiful with shades of blue and white:) It’s an 11 days trip with 5 days of activities with the other remaining days travelling to & fro from Ushuaia. However, if u are planning to do all activities such as camping, Kayaking and mountaineering, I would advise u to book at least 2 years in advance or not book at all. I booked my trip in May/June 2019 and was assigned Group D (note: there are 6 groups A B C D E F total). Those in group A have e choice to book their activites first and when an activity get cancelled, Group A has the priority to go on another date. For me, I didn’t get to go camping and Kayaking and it was disappointing as the weather conditions were good in general. About 100 persons signed up for camping and only 30 persons can camp each night. Guides also said that its impossible to have 5 days of good weather in Antarctica which means some people were nvr meant to camp. There were many landings on Antarctic. If landings alone is good enough for u, probably this is the right company to choose then!
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Comment from Oceanwide Expeditions
First of all, thank you very much for leaving your feedback. Hereby we'd like to offer you some background information.
Yes – we encourage early bookings for obvious reasons. Due to guest demand we simply have to have a priority booking system in order to accommodate everybody the best possible way. We have been developing such a system throughout the years and the current format has been deemed the best and most fair by our expedition teams in the field. Of course, we gather all feedback and try to improve our system even further when possible.
We most often manage to get all the interested campers, mountaineers, and kayakers out on one each of the activities. Indeed 5 days of great weather in Antarctica is not very often encountered but we do only need 4 to get all out should everybody have booked for camping and most often we actually manage to get everybody out in only three camp nights.
The weather is everything and safety is paramount to us. We cannot take any risks and it may be perceived as good weather but forecasts, ice drift, etc. may dictate that the EL and activity guides take a cautious approach.
On your trip we managed 2 camping nights and one group didn’t manage to go kayaking. It was unfortunate that one group who had camping cancelled also had kayaking cancelled due to ice.
As far as we are aware all mountaineers went out as we had a couple of days where we could take extra people. Everyone did snow shoeing and photo workshops were offered on most landings, so anyone who wanted expert guidance had the opportunity to join Amelia for a photo workshop.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss this any further.