Shared Shuttle from Manuel Antonio to San Jose

Dear William_M, We are truly disappointed to hear of your perception of our shuttle service. At Faro Travel Costa Rica we take our role as vacation planners very important and we pride ourselves in providing excellent customer service and top noch transportation service, this can be verified by the hundreds of rave reviews on this and other platforms. We regret that you did not have an overall pleasant experience and sadly all due to a misunderstanding. We ran an investigation about this situation and there are a variety of explanations that I will go over them below. 1. You booked this service through a intermediary site "VIATOR" and NOT directly on our official website "www.farotravelcostarica.com" So I don't know what exactly you got told from VIATOR your departure time would be, and this could have been the reason of miscomunication. 2. Every shared shuttle is clearly stated with an standard departure time online in the profile of the service on viator website. However, the pick-up times for shared transport will always vary according to the pick-up location, since the same vehicle has to pick up different pasengers at different pick-up locations (hotels). If you want to choose your own departure time, I personally recommend taking the private transportation service next time, so you can choose at your best convenience the time you will be traveling. 3. From the beginning it was difficult to get in contact with you as we had to message you several times trying to find out the drop off location to accommodate you in the right shuttle, since you did not provide this information from the time you made the booking. 4. When finally got an answer from you, the conversation we had on July 5, 2021, (4 days before the date of the service) we messaged you the booking confirmation with the exact pick-up time as we always do and that confirmation said 12:30 pm. This same booking confirmation was sent to you again on July 6, 2021 with all the information you needed to know to be ready for pick-up at 12:30 pm and we asumed you saw this since you kept responding to the following messages. WE DID NOT CHANGE THE DEPARTURE TIME ON THE DAY OF THE SERVICE. 5. The day of the shuttle on July 8, our professional driver (Gilberth) showed up at the hotel reception to pick you up and the receptionist (Natalie) told our driver that you were at the beach and you weren't ready to get picked up. I quickly proceeded to contact you through a phone call to inform that we were waiting for you at the hotel reception and also sent you several messages. When we got in contact, you told me you were heading back to the hotel to catch the shuttle and we waited for you until 1:20 pm (50 additional minutes of courtesy wait time without any showed up by your person). 6. Shared Shuttle it's a SHARED transportation, it means people with the same travel itinerary shares a car to ahead to their destination, all of them under very strict time frames. At the point we were waiting for you some other clients were complaining about the long time waiting we had because of your reason. No other shuttle company would have waited for you this long and would have left you behind if you were not there. In this case we believe we went the extra mile to provide excellent service and get you to your destination by telling our driver to wait for you and delaying transportation for other passengers, and you still didn't appreciate our help. I hope the points above help shed some light on what contributed to your experience. I believe there were gaps in communication that lead to mis-understanding and ultimately an undesirable experience. We take our job very seriously and we learn from criticism. We are always willing to admit our faults and work to improve and adapt when we make a mistake. However we don't see where we failed here if the right information was provided to you ahead of time. I hope in the future you can choose the best service that your needs require. We don't think is fair to receive this rating since is part of shared shuttle policies and you were also aware of this. We offer any apologies if there is something you might think we did wrong. I hope you will be willing to travel with us someday again. Pura Vida! Freddy, owner Faro Travel Costa Rica WhatsApp: +506 8578-4040