Morten
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North Island ▷ Auckland Region ▷ Auckland ▷
Maui Motorhomes
We had a great experience with Maui.
Rented the Mercedes River 6 Berth and drove it from Queenstown to Auckland in 18 days. Worked perfect, sensitive to sidewinds, but that comes with the size. Very impressed by the roadside assistance: Had a front tire puncture on the North Island. Called the roadside assistance and withing 1 1/2 hour a nice guy had found us and changed the wheel! Of course the reaction time depends on you location and we were not in the worst spot, but still on the countryside though. Only reason for not giving a "10" is that the service in Queenstown was a little "unpersonal" when we picked up the campervan. Auckland service was spotless.
The Maui River 6 Berth is expensive, but for us it was worth all the money!
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South Island ▷ Nelson Region ▷ Abel Tasman ▷
Abel Tasman Independent Guides
Sadly, this is not a good review.
Background: Got up very late, so knew we by far had missed the full day kayak tours, but asked the selling agent if it was possible to do half a day. That was no problem, he spoke good about doing half a day and gave us a discount - seemed very eager to sell the half day kayak to my wife and I.
Got down to the place at Old McDonalds Farm and was met by our "guide" (a young guy, no need to mention names). He seemed in a hurry, but did not explain why, so initially we did not understand we had to hurry (because of the tide coming in we found out later). We prepared some food for the kayak, put sunscreen on etc. Apparently our guide thought we were slow (although he had not told us to hurry) and got pissed, so from then on he was very rude, commanding and in no way welcoming. He even at one time said that we were "bad timing" because he had been on a lunch break! (Nice way to treat a customer :-) Funny thing was that we in no way pushed for going on the trip, we just asked and the selling agent was very positive. If it was such a problem, they could just have said no. He told us, we needed an hour for instructions on the beach, but because we were in such a hurry, we only got 10 minutes of very poor instructions before we were asked to get into the kayak and go off. Simply not okay, and they even advertise to have the best and safest instructions.
Anyway, we got on the water and joked about the guide maybe had been hangry because of the missed lunch. I honestly exspected an apology when we got back some hours later, but our guide continued being very rude, switching between ignoring us and insulting us. We were pretty shocked so decided we just wanted to get away - in hindsight I should have sat down with our guide and told him what I write above, but we simply just wanted to get away.
A shame, because the kayaking we got to do was lovely!