Xrail company in Cozumel?

[Nightstarzz]

Well... I did have an excursion for xrails booked through the cruise line... and for whatever reason, they canceled it and dropped that particular excursion. My fiance is really wanting to do that one (I havent told him its been canceled yet.) ANYHOW.... I am looking for a reputable company to go through privately to rebook the xrails. Any suggestions?

 

If you had done xrails already, what did you think?

[mrsfuzzmo]

Book it through shoretrips dot com. My girlfriend just got back and they absolutely LOVED this excursion. They booked excursions in all three ports via shoretrips and it went off without a hitch. I've booked with them as well. They are a US based website that offers third party (non-ship) based excursions. They are extremely reputable. I just used them for the personal mini subs in Cozumel two weeks ago.

[happybooker1]

Used this company: http://www.wild-tours.com

 

We did the xrails to Jade Caverns & my son loved it! He is 16 so he got to drive--LOL!

 

Everything went off as they said it would. Guide met us on time, got us the taxi ride to their property, excursion went off without a hitch, & we were back by 1:00 from the 9:30 (their time) tour.

[Nightstarzz]

I called Carnival, and they said the tour operator canceled the excursion. See i saw many post on trip advisor, saying things continaually breaking down. Anyone hear about this?

 

3rd cruise: Carnival Legend, January 26th - February 2nd, 2014

[Soundview77]

I did a mini review of an Xrails excursion that I did in 2/2011. Here is a link. My review is Post #5.

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1833328

[mrsfuzzmo]

Friends did it literally two weeks ago (Dec. 12, 2013). LOVED IT!

[senojtterb]

I have been on 24 cruises and have done many side-trips/excursions. We have done zip-lining tours where you are pretty much entirely on your own to hook up and release your harnesses and you don’t see a tour guide going from tree to tree except for maybe every 20 minutes just to make sure you’re still ok. They had the same exact approach on this tour, but instead of them leaving you to have fun on your own, this tour literally just left us behind. The “tour” began with a nice guy to lead you to your taxi and ours was a regular van with 7 open seats. We climbed into the van and hit the road. We drove for approximately ten minutes to the destination and all got out of the van (so good so far). It was all good until the “Wild Tours” staff took over. They sat us down on benches to explain what they had planned for us for the day. The lady (who seems to be the manager) comes out and starts selling her soul along with about 6 different (as they described) “must haves” to be able to drive what is essential a dune-buggy. She told the terrors of not having these “must-haves”, such as bandanas, leather gloves, locker keys, things that looked like the Croc’s brand of shoes but had a name that looked like greek letters mixed with some random letters from the English alphabet. Now, mind you, behind her the staff stand off to the side and make this one Macaw bird fly back and forth during the introduction and pretend like it’s some sort of wild bird just exploring the property. After this, the introduction wrapped up and the pictures began. You may want to take one of your own pictures with a camera you brought, but no-no-no. They had 2 Macaws at the beginning for us to hold and they did strange tricks with it like holding it like a baby. Besides the fact that the only time in a Macaws life that they are on their backs is when they’re dead, they brought out a Golden Eagle and it looked like they had “trimmed” his tail feathers with a chainsaw. They were all chopped up and a few of them were still barely hanging on because the workers hadn’t managed to cut them totally and were hanging on by a thread. Once the hundreds of “photo-ops” were done, they proceeded to drag the bird to its “perch”, which is essentially a stick sticking out of the ground. The bird fought the worker the entire way there, as his way of probably saying, “Please let me go, I’m begging you to let me get out of this place”. This is when they took a literal chain and chained the eagle to the perch. In the intro the manager lady talks all about “conserving” the wildlife and tries to get you to buy pictures of you mistreating the birds yourself and doing the unnatural tricks that the employees do with the birds. However, on the property they have approximately four enclosures and three of them had nothing in them, which, after seeing how they treated the birds, these other animals probably committed suicide or ran away. They gave us a small safety briefing and then took us to the vehicles. Looking at them, they didn’t look too bad so we climbed in, but in the “workshop” they had about 20 of them parked and there was one mechanic banging on them (I sincerely doubt he was a legit mechanic). There were about 15 X-Rails and within minutes we were off. We got about 1/8th of a mile and the caravan of X-Rails came to a halt. In the safety briefing they promised that if anyone had ANY issues that they would personally bring you out a perfectly operating X-Rail so we could continue. We saw them get a couple out of their X-Rail and they moved the machine so that we could get past to continue the tour. We got another 300 yards and another one in front of us broke down. After this they had a young crocodile that they flung around and gave to each passenger in the X-Rail to take, once again, another photo. They moved the buggy to the side and had all of us pass these people. So far, we are about ¼ mile and two of the X-Rails had already completely died. We continued to drive and ours got to the point where it was sputtering and dying so bad that to even get it to go forward after we had stopped for other people who kept breaking down, we had to rock our bodies back and forth to get some momentum to get the vehicle to start moving forward. Not even a joke, the X-Rails breaking down continued on. By the time we had made it to the “cavern”, my fiancée and I were one out of three who hadn’t had a breakdown. We walked down some steps to the “cavern” and on the way, the tour guide tells us that the cavern is actually just a sinkhole, and the water in it looked like a pond filled with plant fertilizer. It smelled and looked like garbage, and the tour guide said that it was only sulfur we were smelling and not to be concerned. I went for a swim while my fiancé stayed on the dock and I looked up to see thousands of bats literally pooping and peeing in the water we were all swimming in. I’m not a disease expert but I’m pretty sure that’s how people can get multiple diseases, by swimming in water filled, quite literally, with bat bathroom material. I got out of the water as fast as I could. On the way up I mentioned to one of the guides that my X-Rail kept stalling out and how we couldn’t get it to move forward without jostling our bodies to get it going, and in his words, it was “ok” and that “if it breaks down we will fix it”. I told him it already was broken and he ignored me and walked away. So we climb in and this time I let my fiancé drive and we made it about 100 yards and our vehicle completely dies. There was supposed to be a guide behind us, but he had zoomed by moments before on his ATV and we, as well as the 6 X-Rails behind us, waited almost five minutes before anyone even realized we were missing. He came back and starts stripping wires on our engine and hooking them back together and hitting the engine to try to get it to work. Not surprisingly, the engine just sputtered and wouldn’t start. He then told us to get in this “new” X-Rail they had at the back of the group. We climb in and the guy in the one in front of us turns around and says, “We were just driving that one and it broke down and only had one working wheel to power the vehicle”. All they had done was that when one would break, they were just trading them out with the other ones in the group that had just broken minutes before. My fiancé starts going and immediately the vehicle goes straight to the right and into a tree. Thankfully we weren’t hurt but the guide had already left so I had to get out and move it on my own. I put it back on the road and she hits the gas, and boom, it goes immediately right again into the bushes. I thought it was just her so I switched back seats. I had driven the other one out there so I figured it would be a piece of cake. I hit the gas and the same exact thing happened again. The guide finally shows up and I tell him and he magically forgot how to speak English and completely ignored me. The guy and the mechanic start banging on the engine like that was the problem, when clearly it was the wheels. After a few minutes the guide learned English again and told me that it was fixed. I had no idea how that would be possible but I took his word for it. Long story short, the vehicle only wanted to go right and it was like an arm-wrestling match with the steering wheel the keep the vehicle going semi-straight. Whenever we hit a puddle the wheel would automatically jerk to the right and I had to keep using everything I had to try and avoid crashing into another tree. This went on for over 30 minutes. We finally got to the end of the “crash-course” and the guide had me pull it into their “maintenance area” with about 25 other X-Rails that were also completely broken. The employees then had us all follow them to where the “Mexican showers” were (I was kind of worried about exactly what that meant). We walk to the area and they say that they are trying to conserve water by using those “Mexican showers”, but they let the water run nonstop even when no one was using them and they were running the entire time until we left. We walked to where they said they had “complimentary chips and salsa”, and I arrived to see what was the equivalent of around 15 tortilla chips and movie theater nacho cheese that had expired a year ago and they had left it out in the sun. Seeing this my fiancée and I decide that since we weren’t interested in getting food poisoning from the old cheese, we walked over to where a nice family of 5 were standing, who were also not interested in getting sick. They were the same people we had ridden over to this X-Rail graveyard with us from the ship in a 7 person van (and in my book that’s a van full to capacity). We swapped stories about what went wrong on their tour and both of our groups recanted all the breakdowns, getting left behind, the sad state of their animals, and simply how this business didn’t get completely shut down for the hundreds of safety issues. The family and us both decided we wanted to just leave to get back to the ship without having to deal with more of this disaster. Then, one of the employees approaches us to tell us we “have to fill out these comment cards before you leave”. Hearing this, I looked at the employee and said, “honestly man, you definitely don’t want my opinion on that comment card”. He explains again that we have to and are entirely obligated to do so. My fiancée, just wanting to get this all over with finally says she will fill one out and she gave them all poor reviews and that the only semi-nice thing was the staff. Hoping this would expedite the process, the other family filled one out as well and we then requested if we could ride back to the ship since we had the taxis maximum number of occupants. The guy said that we have to wait, and the husband of the other group tells him how we just want to leave and that they had driven us here like this, so why do we need to wait for the rest of the group when they aren’t even in our taxi. The employee walks off and you’ll never guess who comes out now. The manager lady who tried to get us to buy all of their “must-have” merchandise, and told us about how they’re all about “conservation”, when they are the ones bulldozing through the jungle and keeping their last, living, animals in deplorable conditions. She tells us that we have no choice but to wait and that we can just sit there until every single person from our ship is ready to leave, even though they came in a separate taxi. The husband of the family basically end up telling the lady that they can’t just keep us there and that we want to leave and go back to the ship. She starts to get mouthy with the guy and finally storms over to one of the taxis and I thought she had asked him to take us back to the ship. He opens the doors and we all pile in, thankful to have this nightmare over, and as soon as we have all piled in, the taxi driver steps out of the driver’s seat, walks to the front of the taxi where his fellow taxi drivers were gathered, and proceeds to light up a cigarette. Everyone in our taxi couldn’t believe what we were seeing and at this point, we were so fed up with all of the craziness, just started laughing about it because it was so unbelievable. After five minutes he decides to come open the door to our taxi and I couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t believe what was next. We see five people walking toward our taxi and the taxi driver motioning for them to “climb on in”. They dad of the family who was approaching looks in the door and says, “Uhh, this taxi is already full…” The taxi driver assures them and us that there is more than enough space, and he sandwiches us all in. We had a seven person van, and he literally crammed twelve of us in to the point where we couldn’t move whatsoever. We got back to the ship and later that night my fiancée and I put together a bullet-point checklist of everything on the tour that had gone wrong, and we filled up both sides of a sheet of paper and had actually run out of space so we even wrote around the edges. We gave it to the Captain’s Club staff which is when you must have gone on at least ten Royal Caribbean/Celebrity cruises, and we have been on 24 now, so they definitely take your word for it when you place a complaint. Never before had we ever placed a complaint on any side-trip ever, so this was a first. They took one look at the sheet and listened to our specific details. She asked if she could keep the list to present to the Shore Excursion manager on board and give them all the details. The next morning at around noon we received a call from the manager and she was as nice as could be about it. Apologizing and simply listening to the full story. At the end of the conversation she explained how much she appreciated all of the information and for documenting it all so that they can do an “investigation” because they do not want to be backing a company like that who has such a high risk of injury and lack of management. She refunded my money (which blew me away because the tickets specifically say “non-refundable”) and continued to thank us for being so proactive about it. Both, the Head of the Captain’s Club and Shore Excursions Manager, impressed us for truly taking what had happened to us and everyone else on the tour seriously. We couldn’t thank them enough, and honestly, never ever ever consider this tour, go to one of the beaches or snorkeling side-trips so you don’t have to repeat our mistake.