Grand Canyon air tour

[shamrock77]

I have a friend who would like to take the one day airplane tour to Grand Canyon, where they pick you up at your hotel and drop you off at the end of your day. Can anyone suggest a company I can give her the info for? Did a google search but can't tell if they are good or bad - would like info from someone who has done this. Thank you Jude

[KenoMom]

I'm not going to name names, but my husband had a very bad experience and it's worth sharing to educate others on how important it is to carefully select vendors...

He booked a one day flight to the Grand Canyon and was picked up at 4 am in front of our hotel. The flight left on time and then the sad part started. It turns out that the weather at the canyon was quite different from the Las Vegas weather.

The "rule" was that you would have the trip refunded if they were unable to fly. The problem is that while they were able to fly "TO" the Grand Canyon, they weren't able to fly around the canyon itself. By going up in the plane, this allowed them to claim that they had flown. The contract had been careful to not mention that they had to fly around the canyon. We should have read it better!

So my husband landed at a small airport down that way and had to wait until it was time for the plane to return back to Vegas. Oh yeah, he could opt to take a ground tour but his money was already lost for the arial trip and he wasn't about to spend any more. For 4 hours, he sat at the airport - no food available (despite the tour supposedly providing a boxed lunch).

6-8 hours later he returned to Las Vegas, completely disappointed in missing the view and extremely perturbed about not getting a refund of any amount. To this day, any mention of a trip to the Grand Canyon is met with "forget it...maybe some other time" <G>.

So before booking, PLEASE check the refund policies for the tour. As a former travel agency owner, I was so confident in thinking that I had read all of the fine print.