Freedom Treks & Boat Bike Tours

Freedom Treks & Boat Bike Tours: The good, the bad and the ugly. I would highly recommend avoiding this company. The extra charges beyond the expensive luxury boat cruise and Ebike rental was outrageous. It was a fantastic trip only because of the Croatian Islands. We have been on three other bike and barge tours, which cost way less, had way better food, had more interactive staff, better historical knowledge. Basically everything was subpar – especially for the price paid. They charge you extra for water and it had to be paid in cash. Corkage for bringing your own wine on the ship was €20 a bottle which is outrageous, in fact it’s 4 times as much as what we were charged other bike and barge tours. Since it was a luxury cruise, we expected consistent excellent meals. I can only state that there were two meals that were good. After tipping was provided in envelopes for the staff, our last meal was downright awful. They didn’t even serve it to us, they just put a big platter in the middle of each large table of eight people and expected us to reach across and dig in. On previous trips, we were always treated to a snack immediately upon returning to the ship from a long bike trip. There was nothing provided by this company, so people found themselves extremely hungry by dinner time. You weren’t allowed to bring any food or drink onto the ship so was torture. They placed salad in the middle of the table some meals but it was heavily sauced with some type of mayonnaise and there wasn’t nearly enough for 8 people and again we had to reach for it ourselves. One of us ended up being the server which you would not expect to have to do on a luxury cruise.
Beer on the ship was 5 euros per beer, as was a small glass of wine. Coffee was served only first thing in the morning and it was some syrupy warmed up mix which somebody said was a pre-mix. It was awful. As soon as breakfast was over, the coffee was taken away, which is just as well. If you wanted to have a decent coffee, you had to order it from the coffee machine at 2.50 euros.

Just one month prior to our trip, we received an email from freedom tracks, stating that they messed up on the booking and they didn’t have proper accommodations for some of their staff. They reached out to each one of us in our 10 person booking to find out if we were interested in changing cabins from twin beds to double. Not sure how they ended up solving that one, but that was just another example of their unprofessional business practices. During the cruise sailors entered our room every day without telling us and emptied out the garbage, looked for food items that we might have brought on-board, and threw away things they thought should be thrown away. I complained that something of mine got thrown out, they looked for it and couldn’t find it and were visibly aggravated by the fact that I didn’t think it was garbage, but they did. Future encounters with these individuals was extremely awkward with a evil eye given to me when our paths crossed. The old boat did not have a bow thruster, and therefore we missed going to the island of Brač since the winds were too high for us to dock. Had the boat been better outfitted as a luxury boat should have, it would’ve had a bow thruster in which case we would’ve been able to dock safely and we would’ve been able to see that island as promised. Apparently Boat Bike Tours is the actual company that manned the ship and so they are dirctly responsible for this disaster but Freedom Treks chose to work with them so they are ultimately responsible. One person of our group had direct communication with Freedom Treks representative to express our serious displeasure and they said starting next year they will have proper coffee available to which I say yahoo, but sorry not enough to impress me.

they responded: Thanks for at least responding to my review – now get to work on making some improvements