My family (12 of us) had an awesome trip to Tivua Island on 1st Jan, 2020 on the beautiful vintage catamaran The Ramarama with just a few things that I would like to highlight. Hopefully my comments could be taken constructively. -
1. Sausage Rolls from Hot Bread Kitchen. (There are other places that would make better rolls then the ones served on the ship). ( i saw the sausage rolls, recognized it and asked a staff if it were from HBK and he admitted that it was!) HBK can do better sausage rolls if you ask them, rather then the dry puffed and disgusting rolls that was served.
2. Services of the bar attendant on the island. Food was served late due to our late arrival on the island and being hungry i politely asked her the exact time for lunch. She then proceeded to tell me that it would be served around 1.30pm to which i replied that it was already 1.30. She then proceeded to tell me to go and ask the chef directly????? (I was only asking because i had a medical condition on the day)... I thought that the young lady was rude and ill equipped to handle different kinds of customers in her response to me. Please inform your staff that all customers are equal irrespective of race and color. I spoke to her supervisor and the young lady was asked to come and apologize which she did. I am sure that there that a good number of your customers may have been at the receiving end of this young lady's attitude, and my point is that all your staff need to be trained to deal with both local and international customers and that their internal bias may have been the cause of her demarcated services between local and international tourists.... Had she worked for me i would have sacked her for misrepresenting my brand!
3. FMF cookies - Again- I cant believe that your staff served FMF choc-chip cookies! - the staff could have ordered cookies from a hotel ect rather then serving tasteless cheap cookies! For 100 passengers... they could have ordered $40.00 worth of sausage rolls and $40.00 worth of cookies!
4) Your entertainers needs to expand their songs database, as the same songs were sung on our way to Tivua were also sung on our way back. Also a slavery song was being sung and i personally think that the singers were ignorant of what they were singing!
5) After reading he other reviewers/complainants about safety... it seems to me you are defending the issues on safety without being fully aware of what happens on the ground. We were told that there was only 1 safety jacket on board so up till now I am not sure whether that was some kind of sick joke or was it real?
6) The jetty needs to be fixed asap. While i understand that there were strong winds five days earlier, your staff could have fixed the jetty soon after the cyclone. We had to be transferred to a dirty glass bottom boat to land us on shore! We mentioned to the skipper that we could not see any marine life as the glass was dirty. (this was cleaned immediately after our complain). We arrived at Tivua at 12.15 and landed on the island at 1.00pm. Rather then spending 4 hours on the island- we spent only 3 hours! The island and the vintage catamaran were extremely beautiful !
The little things.... may seem irrelevant but it sure does make a big difference!