Parents have started early this year (2010) to fund raise for their trips to DC

My own daughter is now in high school and it has been 2 years since that Washington DC trip that this blog was all about. The next batch of 8th graders have started to do fund raising even before the school year has started. From what I have heard so far, the parents lost money instead of getting money. That is not a good start. I don't know if they are using World Strides again this year but I hope they are not. They should give a local travel agency the opportunity to get them some great deals.

I never did get that $100 or so back from World Strides. Their claim of it being "just too small of an amount for them to refund" is such BS. I certainly hope that this blog and others like them have caused them to lose more than $100 over the last 2 years. Just to make sure they do get what they deserve I will up date the blog with any news on World Strides and their nasty business practices.

Worldstrides the tour company your school should stay away from

In my previous post about our problems with Worldstrides (you can read that post here) I mentioned the fact that Worldstrides had been involved with a bankruptcy. I had found that information via a private members only message board. It may or may not be in error but apparently the post got the attention of Worldstrides themselves. It is amazing to me that a blog that gets only 3 visitors a week would set off alarms at a small travel agency (Worldstrides only has 300 employees worldwide, hardly a large corporation) Because of that post I got a long 5 paragraph email from Mr. Martin, one of the VP's at Worldstrides trying to "correct" my blog post.

In answer to that email I will "correct" the word bankruptcy with a link to a court document that goes into great detail about how Lakeland Tours (which is what Wordstrides use to be known as) debts mounted up and how Worldstrides was formed under questionable dealings. You can see that document in full here. You can form your own opinion about Worldstrides after reading that.

Next I would like to mention that Mr. Martin prided himself in the fact that the Better Business Bureau of Richmond, VA gave Worldstrides an A+ as a rating. That is indeed true but on the same page they (the BBB) mention the 18 complaints against the company, in the last 36 months alone that were "resolved" (it was not mentioned how they were "resolved")

Another website also listed complaints against Worldstrides and you can see them at this link.

Mr. Martin's email goes on to mention the fiasco with the Bush inauguration which I had mentioned in the prior blog post. He said and I will quote him here, "During the inauguration program we provided an additional 1-2 days of lodging, meals, sightseeing, and transportation for over 1,000 students affected by both security and weather issues. This was done at no additional cost to the participants." Since I have no way of knowing if that is true or not I will give you a link to the news article that started of of this and let you decide. Here is the news article. Of course Worldstrides did not give out refunds to those kids, why am I not shocked. They like to keep what ever money comes their way and they stick to their no refund policy - they kept my money didn't they.

That is not all the news I have on them. Stay tuned for the next installment because there is more!

Those people at Worldstrides should have given me my money back. Now they will get lots of unwanted and free publicity.

A sad day

Today I had to call Worldstides and cancel my own daughter's trip. Try as we might we could not fund raise enough money to even come close to paying even 25% of the total amount due. My daughter took the action well. What upset me was the fact they would NOT refund any...and I do mean any, of my money, stating the amount is too SMALL!!!

Worldstrides, if you are reading this, no amount of money is too small to refund in this economy. I did let everyone else in our small school group know about me not getting a refund and they were totally shocked.

Also today I received a rather long and odd email from a Mr. Martin from Worldstrides. He apparently has visited this little blog and he was not happy with my findings via the internet on Worldstrides. I will be sharing what he wrote in his email in a post that I am drafting. I would not have even mentioned his "interesting" email until I was informed about the "sorry but that amount is too small to refund" policy they have at Worldstrides. If they had not pissed me off with not refunding my money I would not have dug really deep in finding even more dirt on Worldstrides. Let's just say that I will be sharing my sources of information with the readers of this blog.

Headaches with Worldstrides

The time is getting closer for the parents to come up with the money for trip. In a few weeks all the money is due. I will be calling Worldstrides myself to see if they offer any financing options for the price of the trip. As a group we have been highly disappointed with Worldstrides as a company to deal with. They are constantly adding $15 late fees and $6 processing fees to each monthly statement we get from them. At those rates their monthly payment system is more expensive than using a credit card.

This is the first time that the Lebanon School district used Worldstrides and it will be their last. The school district had been using a local travel agency for years for the trips and had heard good stuff about Worldstrides (via Worldstrides own publicity no doubt) that they thought that they would give Worldstrides a try. The only problem with that is the fact that we are suffering because of it and it might put the kids trip into jeopardy.

In the last few weeks I have done some internet searching to see what I could dig up about Wordstrides. I have found out that they did have a bankruptcy (see updated blog post for the truth about Worldstrides in great detail - click here), not an official bankruptcy but failing to pay huge debts. Around 2005 and they were also investigated by the Federal Government for fraud concerning a group of high schoolers that purchased a trip from Worldsrtrides to see President Bush's inauguration. They never got to the inauguration.