Halsbury Travel Group Reviews 234

Badly organised trip to Nice. The language school that was booked for us was unsafe for children and the quality of teaching was terrible. Host families were not flexible and did not engage well with the children from our group. Lunch was provided by the language school but only consisted of a single sandwich per student and staff member and a bottle of water. When contacted to say it wasn’t enough the language school bought some apples… The “guided tours” of Nice and Monaco were not guided tours but tours with a teacher of the language school and the quality of these was also poor. When I tried to contact my trip leader at Halsbury I could never get in touch with her because she hardly ever worked. It was overall a very stressful experience and I would definitely not recommend this company.

A brilliantly organised trip. Great excursion s and matches pitched at just the right level.

Do NOT use Halsbury travel. This trip to Barcelona was terribly organised. Museums were not properly booked, the hostel was booked in the wrong location miles from the centre of the city. The food at the hostel was hardly edible. The address was not given for where to meet a guide for a guided tour. A promised coach was not provided. Then on the way back we had been booked on a later flight without consultation. An absolute shambles. Disgraceful.

Superb 4 day trip to Barca / Salou 24th September. Travelled with 36 pupils who had a fantastic time at the Cambrills Sports Village , fixtures, coaching , theme park, nou camp etc etc. Every aspect of the tour was superbly organised and went to plan and all as described. Great communication , planning and value for money from Halsbury. I will be doing the same again next year with them. Brilliant trip, thank you to Halsbury, Kate, Maria for a hassle free well organised school tour.

We have been working with Halsbury Travel as a business transformation partner for well over a year now. Great forward thinking business & team that really focus on delivering trips that are as every bit memorable as they are educational.
Looking forward to a continued partnership to bring about unparalleled innovation to educational travel.

I've worked as a supplier for Halsbury for several years now. Having worked in the travel and education sectors previously, I've found Halsbury to be brilliant - excellent service, very open to feedback, complete support with any requests, and generally just lovely to work alongside.

Halsbury plans great school journey trips taking into account the requests and needs of the group. They are always on hand resolve issues should a problem arise. The Halsbury team are friendly and professional.

Halsbury enabled our students to have an amazing time in Florida as a series of STEM, educational experiences.
Halsbury planning was excellent, and communication throughout was immediate and helpful - highly recommended.

Personnel attention when booking and in build up to the tour. Tour was tailored to our needs and not just a generic tour schedule!

My daughter and her classmates had a wonderful trip to France.
The organisation was excellent and the fun factor was high.
Brilliant 😊

We have travelled with Halsbury for five music tours and have always been impressed with their service at every level. Occasionally we have had issues when on tour and the music team has always been quick to assist us. Their use of local agents on some of our visits has been invaluable and we will certainly use Halsbury again.

Our experience of this company has been mixed. If I was writing this review before May 2023 it would be very bad indeed. I had been attempting to communicate with Halsbury regarding a school music trip to Paris in July for around 6 months with very little response and no-one assigned to handle our school's trip. If it hadn't been for Sarah N who started at the company in April then we would probably have cancelled our tour as by that stage I had run out of patience with them.
Sarah managed to turn that around and worked extremely hard to put a tour in place that satisfied all our requirements. We had a good hotel and three concert performances at top venues in Paris: Luxembourg Gardens, St. Sulpice and the American Church. There was even an audience at each one.
We did have an issue with the coach company on one day, which was not really Halsbury's fault.
In conclusion, a terrible start which was rescued just in the nick of time by Sarah who was very responsive and always available on the phone (even at 7 am on the Sunday when we departed)
I get the impression this company has been through a difficult patch and I hope that they are now starting to pull things back again.

We have had a partnership with Halsbury for years, they are always friendly, reliable, and dedicated. We look forward to working with you for years to come.

Amazing trip with a great professional team. Highly recommend!

I posted a few weeks ago about their lack of communication and how we were still waiting for an itinerary. Well not surprising this company is a joke! We had an itinerary 2 days prior to departure. The itinerary was wrong. I told them more than a month in advance that we could'nt do the Louvre Museum on a Tuesday as it is closed every Tuesday. They promised to look into it and change our itinerary but obvioulsy this was too difficult for them. Why do I have to work out that the Louvre would be closed on a Tuesday. We pay them to do the job but no.
Arriving to Paris, we discover that the rooming shared with us was completely wrong which meant redoing something at the last minute with 95 students. Safeguarding is not important for them as they gave us rooms where there was only 1 double bed, expecting us to put 2 students in. 3rd day we went to the address provided for our dinner. When we arrived at the address there was no restaurant to be found. I had to find the correct address and we were 40 minutes late to our booking. The restaurant manager had a go at me and when I explained the situation he was furious with the company.
The amount of stress due to the lack of organisation skills from this company is not acceptable. Please avoid them at all cost. So many other things happened because of Halsbury... I am still waiting for a phone call from them.

Dear schools & parents, please DO NOT USE this company, they have a habit of cancelling school trips at the last minute leaving children heartbroken. Not a 1 off if you do your research and look through their history & feedback. Disgraceful! Today 50 children were meant to go to Valencia and this company cancelled it 3 days before the trip. And they have the audacity to put fake post on Twitter congratulating the 50 children from HGSC on their trip even though they cancelled it 72 hours before.

I can't believe Halsbury Travel has let down yet another school (re the trip to Germany in the last week). It has prompted me to write my own post.

This review relates to a school ski trip that was due to start on 1 April. Less than 24 hours before departure, Halsbury Travel cancelled the trip citing problems with the coach bookings. Please read the many, many reviews below to get an idea of the devastating effect this had on the children, parents and staff members at the multiple schools they did this to.

I struggle to put into words how furious I still am that they caused my child and his friends so much disappointment. We do not go skiing as a family and this was to be his first (and possibly only) ski trip - all the more exciting to be going with his friends. And like many others he had ski kit and lessons as gifts - the kit remains unused and unreturnable.

The responses from Halsbury to the many complaints (see also their Facebook posts around the beginning of April) were crass and underwhelming (along the lines of thank you 'for reaching out' - just awful) and the impersonal letter received by parents made things worse.

'Compensation' was given to schools to pass on to parents but the payments were inconsistent and based on a percentage of the cost of the trip which meant that those schools who had booked more expensive trips got more - but the losses suffered by students on cheaper trips would be the same (if not greater given that poorer families may not already have kit). I haven't accepted the sum allocated as I think there are legal arguments to be had in relation to the inconsistency in amounts and also in relation to the wording in the letter to parents - it is badly written and exposes the company to the risk of a damages claim - it does not cover disappointment, for example.

Halsbury Travel was taken over last year by an investment firm and this can often lead to disquiet amongst employees if it is not handled well. This may have had an adverse effect on staff performance - they are never going to admit it, but given that they are still having issues with bookings I would imagine that this is likely to continue to happen in the future - would you take the risk of using them for future school trips? I certainly wouldn't.

Our trip was cancelled at the beginning of the Easter holidays on the weekend that there were big delays at Dover. I understand that the cancellation of multiple school trips due to (at best) the incompetence of Halsbury Travel would have been one of the headline stories in the media had it not been for the Dover delays. Perhaps the school(s) affected by this latest fiasco relating to the Germany trip could use our story in support of their own legal/media campaign.

Had Halsbury Travel taken the trouble to be less impersonal (maybe by speaking to organisers on the phone to explain the cancellation before putting it in writing - or even better, by visiting the school to face the students and parents to apologise in person) we would feel less angry. But they didn't do this - they ignored the feelings of the devastated children and tried to close down the situation as quickly as possible. Not the actions of a company that supposedly puts the welfare and happiness of children at the forefront of their business. Dreadful behaviour.

I’m utterly disgusted my child was so excited to go to Germany, me and my child were waiting outside the school with all the other parents and kids for one hour and yet we still had hope.My child was told to go into the a school hall to wait for the bus, he ended up texting me three hours later that he had just got on the bus, I was fuming but I was also happy it had finally arrived. Then after an hour and a half of driving they made the decision to turn the bus around and go back to school. My child was devastated at the news and so were all the other 70 children and their carers.I later found out that they turned around because the bus was to heavy to board the ferry.I’m disgusted at the lack of common sense to simply be able to book a bus correctly.

YET ANOTHER CANCELLATION - Wow it seems lightning can strike many times! A long awaited trip to Germany ended in the coach being 3 hours late. When it did eventually arrive and take the school to the docks it was too heavy to board the ferry. Got a phone call in the middle of the night to collect my distraught daughter and the trip was canclled. I cant believe this company is still trading after the huge list of cancllations and errors!

Disgusting company! Cancelled a trip to Germany for 70 kids after leaving the school with the kids on board! Bus not fit for purpose and arrived to pick the kids up 4 hours late 🤬🤬