It's a week after my wife and I returned from this tour so I have had time to consolidate my views. Laos is a beautiful country, and the people are lovely, but on balance this tour leaves a lot to be desired. It didn't help that the flight option from Pakse to Bangkok which should have ended the tour was withdrawn by the airline. This wasn't Wendy Wu's fault, but it meant that they rescheduled the itinerary, and the resulting schedule just didn't work. We were informed of this exactly one week before the tour started. We ended up having too many one night stays in hotels, and even doubling back on ourselves. We also had to cram a lot of sights in which made the days feel rushed, and even then we had hardly any time to wander out on our own. I should point out that the issues with this tour were such that two people left the tour part way through, and another couple were very close to doing the same.
There were three main problems with this tour. Firstly, for the majority of the tour, our group of eighteen were split between three minivans. This wasn't so much of a problem in Luang Prabang, because the journeys were short, but once we left there, we had long hours on the road with no input from our guide, either because he wasn't on our bus, or if he was, there was no easy way for him to speak to us from the front seat. In the itinerary, we had some days labelled as 'scenic drives' but we didn't know what we were supposed to be looking at.
The second issue was the dreadful state of the roads from Luang Prabang to the Plain of Jars, and then from there to Vientiane. Every few hundred meters, the surface of the road had washed away, leaving deeply rutted stretches of potholes which the drivers had to carefully negotiate. What should have been a drive of seven hours ended up being nearly eleven hours and this happened on fully two days of the trip. It also meant that some of the stops we should have had, such as an hour in a village or arriving somewhere to watch locals fish, simply couldn't happen due to the time pressure - or we arrived too late for the expected activity to be going on. It is no lie to say that these days were pure endurance tests. Of course, the state of the roads is not the fault of Wendy Wu, but the scheduling is, and our itinerary was unworkable given the overoptimistic assessment of the journey times.
Thirdly, the quality and location of the hotels were simply not good enough for what should have been a premium tour - and it's not because better hotels didn't exist. With one exception, the Amari Hotel in Vang Vieng (and possibly the one at the Plain of Jars, where there is not a huge choice anyway), the hotels felt low quality and were located away from where you would want to be if you were looking to walk around. Breakfasts were uniformly poor (again apart from the Amari) with very little which would appeal to Western tastes. Our group mostly resorted to fried eggs, omelettes, or just jam on square, slightly sweet, white bread. One should remember that Laos is known for its superlative bakeries and pastries, a legacy of French colonial times, and everywhere there are coffee shops selling cappuccinos and lattes with delightful croissants. Any yet in our hotels, there was only extraordinarily strong drip coffee on offer and no pastries at all (excepting the Amari, which was also the only one offering bacon!). Of particular note (in a bad way) was the S2 Modern in Vientiane, a so-called boutique hotel. Breakfast here was served in the hotel's coffee shop, which could not accommodate everyone if they wanted breakfast at the same time, which didn't offer cereals, and which wanted to charge extra for any coffee other than the slow-drip sludge. I would describe the breakfast here as the worst of the tour. Our room here happened to have floodlights outside facing in to the windows and as the curtains were ill-fitting, the room couldn't be darkened until the floods were turned off sometime around midnight. This hotel was located a good 25 minute walk out of town, along a very busy and unpleasant main road. I am at a loss as to why this hotel was chosen, when Vientiane has an Amari located on the river, right next to the night market, and would have been far more acceptable. We stayed at the hotel for one night before leaving Vientiane for two nights and then returning for the last night. I cannot stress how little we as a group were looking forward to renewing our acquaintance with the S2!
So on balance, this was a tour that was more befitting of an Intrepid 'Basic' style trip, and if it had been, it would have been half the price. I feel it is high time that a Wendy Wu representative did a 'mystery shopping' exercise on this tour so that they can experience its shortcomings for themselves. I would highly recommend anyone to visit Laos, but definitely not with Wendy Wu,
