Review of Beijing Great Wall No-Shopping Private Car Tour by Peter

As a wheelchair user of a number of years who has been travelling widely using my wheelchair I am quite used to getting around problems of access. I have found that by far the best method is to fully research destinations prior to travelling. One of my bucket list items was to visit the Great Wall of China and so to this end we were booking our trip to Beijing over Easter 2019. I researched the best. Places to see the Great Wall that would be accessible for a wheelchair user and found that there are 2 locations where the Chinese have made a great effort by building ramps etc. Before we left the UK and armed with this information I searched for day trip tours that would take us to these locations and found an ideal one being offered by ChinaTour.net. I made all appropriate enquiries with them stating my disability needs and they came back with an 8 hour tour where we would be picked up at our hotel in a private car for just the 2 of us. We would be taken to the first location where our driver would pay the entrance fee to the wall; the driver would then leave us to enjoy the wall at that location. Also included in the tour was an internal shuttle that would take us to the second location, which was also appropriate for wheelchair users. Once we had been to the second location we were to call the driver who would then pick us up and take us back to the hotel. This was perfect! But of course was not cheap, we were charged over $230 which although quite a lot of money I recognise that we have to pay for the convenience I require so all’s good. Well it all started well with the driver contacting us the day before the tour was due to commence to arrange a pick up time. We were duly picked up at 06:30 as arranged by Edward who seemed a very pleasant character and off we went to the wall. Unfortunately when we arrived at the wall we found that the location was anything but wheelchair friendly, in fact there were no ramps at all. I asked Edward about the location being supposed to be disabled friendly with easy access to the wall via ramps etc., he just said “This is the Great Wall, there is no disabled friendly access!” Anyway I had no choice but to climb some steep steps which I did manage to do but it took a great deal of effort and rather spoiled our tour. We spent a nice half hour or so on the wall with Edward taking some photos for us and then returned to the car. We were expecting to see the internal shuttle but Edward didn’t seem to know anything about this and in fact told us that the tour was complete and that he would be taking us back to the hotel. This is what he did with us being delivered back to the hotel by 10:00 a total of 3.5 hours without us being taken to the locations we were expecting to see. Additionally while on the way back Edward asked us what we were going to be doing for the rest of the day and we said that as the tour had been so short we would go and see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Edward told us that for an extra $100 he would be our guide, we declined this as we felt we had already been fleeced enough. I have to say that although ChinaTour.net promised exactly what we wanted and needed they didn’t deliver anything like the tour that we had paid for. I then contacted ChinaTour.net by email and explained how cheated we felt laying out exactly what they had promised, I quoted their email in which set out quite clearly what we could expect. I then went on to set out exactly what the tour delivered by Edward exactly had consisted of which was very different and in no way was comparable. I received an email from Decy who told me she was sorry to hear that we were not happy with the tour and would be contacting Edward to discuss and would get back to us. This didn’t happen, the next thing that happened was that Edward bombarded us with some 20 messages via WhatsApp and would not stop despite being asked repeatedly by me for him to stop, finally I had to block him on WhatsApp! I again emailed ChinaTour.net to ask them to stop Edward’s harassment and received an email confirming that they would do so and apologising for the inconvenience caused. Finally I asked them what they were going to do to recompense us for the shortened tour that didn’t provide what we had paid for but, I have heard nothing else from ChinaTour.net other than being repeatedly asked to provide a review! I would caution anyone who finds a tour that seems perfect for them on ChinaTour.net that it seems likely that you will not get the tour you thought you were going to get. Additionally when you tell them you are not happy with the service you receive you will clearly get nothing from them. Despite repeatedly asking them to explain what went wrong and what they plan to do about this situation I have not received anything at all! For these reasons I would say do not use ChinaTour.net for tours as it is clear they don’t deliver what is promised and don’t care what their customers think at all.