Dear Sandra,
Thank you for your review! I will respond to address a few issues.
First of all, you made a booking of our private tour on Viator and you paid it to Viator in full, meaning you agreed on the price. The price of a private tour is, of course, higher than booking your spot in 18 seater minibus, but it is really not our fault here. If you booked a private tour and ended up being part of a small group tour, that is a valid reason to object, but objecting to us that you booked a private tour (and the private tour you got) and then realizing it is more expensive than group tours just does not make sense. We have a very open cancellation policy, and you could have just canceled our tour up to 24 hours before the tour and booked some other group tour with another agency, and there would not be any problem, and you would get a 100% refund on our tour!
As for the guides on the tour. The first driver guide-Zeljko is our most experienced colleague who just retired from a decade of Work on Hilton's front office. He was our Homeland War veteran, he has his own olive trees and makes his olive oil and his daughter in law is from Cavtat. So to say that he did not take you through Cavtat and that he was not informative sounds very strange to us!
Your port pickup was at 08:30, and you could not have been in Cavtat before 09:30 AM. Everything in Cavtat was open, in Croatia, everything opens at 08:00 am -All the souvenir shops were open, all the cafe bars and bakeries were open, and all places serving breakfast were open. Cavtat is a small town with 3000 people inhabitants, so it does not have big shopping malls, but all the stores were open!
You say that you walked with Zeljko through the promenade, you visited the church of Our Lady of the Snow and you sat for coffee for 20 min, That is already at least 50 min. It takes 30 min to Cavtat and 30 min back plus 20 min on a hill for great panoramic views of the city plus 2 hours tour of the Old Town of Dubrovnik, which is already at least 4 hours and 10 min and our tour lasts 4-4,5 hours.
After the city tour, we give normally our guests one-hour of free time and then take them back to the ship, but your ship had a free shuttle back to the port from the center and you decided to stay longer so that is why you agreed with our guide Pero to stay in the city and end the tour day (you said yourself it was fine).
And Dubrovnik CIty Guide Pero cannot be more energetic than he is. He is actually a new addition to the team, but since I am a guide myself and do city tours, I was listening to him doing guiding tours and I love how he does it, immersing his guests in history and our everyday life stories, and that is why we were glad to be able to have him as one of our team members for this season.
He is a local guy from Dubrovnik, a licensed guide, and even writes questions for local pub quizzes.
All this said, I can just say that i am very sorry that tour did not meet your expectations since we are really trying hard to do whatever we can to make our guests feel like at home and to bring back home great memories from our tour, but at the end, I think that more disappointment from your side came from the fact that you realized that you would have been ok even with free group tour organized by your ship and not pay private tour done in the similar itinerary, but unfortunately, we cannot do anything about it!
We wish you a pleasant rest of your vacation and hopefully, we will see each other back in the future, perhaps on one of our group tours!
All the best
Ivo