Anacortes Yacht Charters

11/10/11

Does not Honor Guarantee

by Bluechablis

This is a quote from Anacortes Yacht Charters (AYC) Guarantee from their website

“Anacortes Yacht Charters guarantees that; should you have a breakdown during your charter, we will complete repairs within 4 (four) hours of notification, or you will be compensated for your vacation time lost.”

Based on our experience they did not make their guarantee. Our trip had been in the planning for over 2 years with some folks coming all the way from Honduras and the rest of us from California. Considerable expense, planning and logistics had been spent on this 7 day charter in the San Juan Islands. On the 5th day of our 7 day charter the engine would not start and our vacation turned into hours spent dealing with the problem and eventually returning the jury-rigged boat back to Anacortes on the 6th day, one day earlier than scheduled.

In hindsight I should have discontinued the charter when the engine malfunctioned and had AYC spend the time and cost of retrieving the boat and getting it back to the marina on their dime. Instead, we brought the disabled boat back ourselves, but we did expect to recieve some compensation for the lost time. We didn’t ask for the 2 actual days lost of our vacation but only the 1 day left on the charter when we returned the boat, pretty fair I think.

The disposition of this matter has been going on for 3 months and all correspondence by phone, voicemail and email to AYC has been ignored. The 300 or so dollars of compensation is not much in comparison to the total expense of our trip but it is the principle of fair and decent service from a company that advertises that this is so.

We will not charter at Anacortes Yacht Charters ever again and we will not be recommending the company to anyone else.

Update: 11_2009 Now that I went to the internet AYC was suddenly interested. However it took 3 months of calling, emailing and finally some internet reviews to receive a small compensation for the lost days due to mechanical failure and even so they don't think we have been "slighted" in customer service!

I have also noticed that they have removed their "Reviews" from their Facebook page even after linking to them on their Yelp Review.

The money was never the issue, we just wanted them to take responsibility for their bad customer service. All we got was excuses and distortion of the facts.