Kyle S.
Yelp
I'll start off with the positive, the front desk girl was very nice and should get a raise for having to relay the bs information from her manager that was too scared to show his face and relay the message himself.
Now for the rest, we booked a trip out here with business clients, everyone flew in and arrived the morning of our booked tour to be informed that the wind looks quite strong and it may not be safe to fly that day. No problem, the website states that if this is the case, we are able to swap our heli tour out for a cat tour. Upon checking in, we asked for more information about the cat tour and received the answer of "oh, our team's not ready for that". Interesting, but okay, there's still a slim shot at the winds letting up so we had breakfast and waited it out for about an hour.
Everyone in the room that day was then informed that, they're calling off the helicopters today, but we can exchange our $1,000 down payment which they are not able to release for a guided tour of snowbird. We inquired about this to see if we were able to gain access to areas that we would not otherwise be able to if we just purchase our own snowbird lift ticket. Nope, we were told it's a guided tour of snowbird itself...for $1,000.
There was a tour guide that sat down with us to hard sell the guided tour option. We're a group of businesspeople, we're well versed in sales. Unless this tour guide was previously in sales, he was not trained here to relat information in that way...unless he does this very often.
We decided to get put on the wait list as we were all in town for 3 more days. On our way out the door, this tour guide stopped us to hard sell the guided tour again and offer for us to stay parked in their lot for the day and come back for lunch in their facility. We took this as a good faith offer since they weren't able to deliver on the tour we had signed up for. We headed down the mountain to snowbird, purchased our lift tickets and had a fun morning.
At lunch time we came back to their facility to warm up and wait for them to prepare the food. After waiting for about an hour and a half (we had showed up early unknowingly and were the ONLY ones in their facility that entire time), we were informed by the front desk girl that she would have to charge us for the lunch since we didn't participate in a guided tour. We thought this was pretty stingy, but asked what they would charge for it since we were already there. She went in the back to discuss with her manager and came back out to let us know it would be $350 per person.
We laughed and walked out. They now refuse to release our down payment, did not bother to contact us a single time even to let us know they were not able to fit us in on the waitlist, and are still holding our down payments. But don't worry, we can come back in the next 2 months and apply this down payment to a full tour, but after the season ends in 2 months, it expires and is forefitted.
It seems this place makes a habit of stealing deposits during bad weather in exchange for a bs guided tour for over 4 times the price it would be to just buy a ticket and fast pass down the road at the lodge.
I'm sure it's great if the weather permits, but be ready for the manager to hide their face and cower in their office if you are not happy with them stealing your money.
What a shame, was really looking forward to this, absolutely will never be back, will never bring clients back, will never step foot in this place again. Hope that stolen deposit gets you a long way!