Wild Frontiers

I booked two 2023 tours to India with Wild Frontiers, one private, and one group tour.

On the plus side, Wild Frontiers chooses high end hotels which are immaculately clean, nary a bed bug, have good to excellent breakfast buffets, and attentive staff. Many have A/C and excellent air filtration and beautiful public rooms. Some have pools and public gardens. Many offer laundry and massage services. These are safe and luxurious accommodations with lots of marble and impeccable staff. Don’t expect to mingle with Indians traveling for business or vacation. You will stay with affluent White Westerners. Very British Raj. You will feel like you never left Mayfair.

Do not expect to high end Indian cuisine, local restaurants, or eating with Indian locals. Your meals will be at tourist buffets. Places where buses of White Westerners are dumped to eat en masse. Most have good food, and offer both Indian cuisine and Western options. You can eat as if you never left home the entire time.

The down-side, and the reason I give this company a one-star rating, is the actual tourism, i.e. visiting sites, can only be called “drive by.” You will spend virtually all your time in your hotel, eating at tourist buffets, drinking beer (at your own cost) in your hotel in the evening, and driving in the bus. When you get to the famous sites you came to India to see, you will have time to take a selfie to show you were there, but you will be raced through. At most cites on the group tour, we spent 30 minutes. Maximum 90 minutes. To put this in context, other tour companies afford visitors 2-4 hours to visit these same sites. The group tour guide told us he was bored because he had seen the sites “hundreds of times.” You will not be able to even begin to fully explore any of the sites you visit. You will be raced through from beginning to end, without seeing most of the grounds.

Basically, Wild Frontiers is drive-by, eat buffets, bus tourism. If your idea of international travel is to say you have been somewhere, and take a photo to prove it, this may suit you well. But if you want to actually visit and soak up the famous historic and cultural sites, do not use Wild Frontiers. Their “half day” tour is only 30-60 minutes site visit time, not the 4 hours that is the industry standard.

As for the guides: For my week-long private tour I had two different guides in two different cities, and then one guide for the two week group tour. The guides on my private tour were both excellent, and quite knowledgeable. The guide for the group tour was far less knowledgeable, and, sadly, a good deal of the “information” he provided was empirically false.

As for the private guides: I contracted with Wild Frontiers for an agreed-upon and detailed itinerary, which we negotiated in detail before I booked the tour. But the guide for my first three days kept changing the schedule, and, instead of half and full day tours, spent only a few meager hours with me. I learned that Wild Frontiers repeatedly breached my contract by instructing my guide to use the time I had paid for to guide other, apparently preferred, group of customers. My half day tours were truncated at Wild Frontier’s direction, giving me scant time to race through places where I had planned to linger. One temple I had specifically negotiated to see, and which was included in my written contract, was cut from my itinerary because instead of guiding me in the morning, as per my contract, the guide had been instructed by Wild Fontiers to use my time to show other, apparently preferred, guests around. By the time he came to meet me there was no time to see the temple because it was closed. The guide himself was apologetic. Wild Frontiers put him in an impossible position.

Again, they receive a one-star rating because breaching written contracts to give preferential treatment to customers who book tours after I did is neither legally nor ethically acceptable. If you want a company that will honor its contractual obligations, do not use Wild Frontiers.

The second private guide was excellent, and enormously knowledgeable. She gave me a blitz tour of Kolkata that was massively varied, informative, and valuable. She did not rush me through sites, but instead used the very limited time we had available for the contractual itinerary to pack in everything. Her knowledge of religion, history, art, politics, etc. was very impressive. The only item in that itinerary I would recommend skipping is the Ganges river boat. While the river tours (at dusk and dawn) on the Ganges in Varanasi are extremely interesting (because you can view aarti, cremations, and morning worship rituals), the boat tour in Kolkata does not add anything to the experience of visiting that fascinating city.

The guide for the group tour was of a far lesser quality. He seemed very inexperienced, unable to manage a group of 11 people, unable to plan for common itinerary changes due to publicly advertised closings, and uninterested in showing us sites for more than race-through viewings. He was clearly bored with the sites, and told us, often, that he has seen them “hundreds of times.” He was personable, polite, and pleasant. However, his knowledge was not only spotty, but often inaccurate. So much so, that by the third day of the two-week group tour, I googled anything he said to determine what was true. He spent a good deal of time spouting various political conspiracy theories. He was in no way malevolent. I think he is very well intentioned. But he yelled and coughed into the tour bus microphone for hours on end, which was tiring. If you want a tour based mostly on far-right political propaganda, or if you don’t care about learning anything factually accurate about India and her fascinating and long history, he would be a great choice.

One final positive note: I became very ill as a result of my exposure to the extremely hazardous air quality index while I was in India. When it became clear that I had to depart early to safeguard my health, Wild Frontiers did help me book a hotel in India that was, according to both Booking.com and the hotel website, fully booked, until I could get my return flight.

Bottom line: In my opinion, Wild Frontiers is not worth the premium price. For context, I enjoyed a similar premium tour to Egypt using a different company that, in addition to booking excellent luxury hotels, booked meals at famous local eateries, and ensured that most of each day was spent actually seeing the sites (6-8 hours a day on average), carefully managing travel time to ensure maximum time at sites. Thus, I know it is possible to run a tour with this focus being on really experiencing the place and people you are visiting.

Wild Frontiers will not give you any encounter with real India. It’s just drive-by-tourism. Additionally, if you book a private tour with Wild Frontiers, expect them to breach your contract so you will not see what you negotiated to see. In short, do not expect to get what you paid for from Wild Frontiers.

J

Jennifer Hoult 9 months ago

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