Pegas: A Mixed Bag of Tour Operator Woes

Hello everyone!

I'm not a fan of organized tours. I prefer planning my trips myself, down to creating the itinerary and booking hotels and flights. But... there are some destinations where it's way more convenient to go with a tour operator, and usually that means resorts! In my childhood, my parents booked package deals to Turkey through Tez Tour, and then our family became a loyal fan of Coral. This year, I took on the task of booking our trip, and by some stroke of luck, Pegas offered the lowest prices for the hotel I wanted.

The tour operator's website isn't much different from the others. It's a bit glitchy when you're filling out the tourist info, but overall, it's pretty good compared to Coral. I still have a soft spot for Anex, but they didn't offer trips to the hotel I liked.

We booked two rooms in the same hotel through two separate packages. The website wasn't clear about whether we could pay partially, so at 11:30 PM, we gave the operator a call. It only took a few minutes to get through. And sure enough, at 12:30 AM, just one minute after booking the tour, a girl called back to confirm the details. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that they call at such an hour. On the one hand, it's efficient, but on the other hand, it's the middle of the night... Pegas operates on a prepayment basis, but gives you very little time: just over a day for the first deposit. You can pay online by card or in cash (it's best to check the website to see where and how they accept cash).As for flights... As you'd expect, the cheapest flights are usually charter ones. Pegas has those: Nordwind/Pegas Fly. I'm familiar with this airline from flights between Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I have to say it's a lot more to my liking than Royal Flight under Coral and Sunmar. For an extra fee, you can choose regular flights, and it might just work out cheaper than a charter. In our case, it was more cost-effective to take a charter for +1 day than to book 9 days on Turkish Airlines for at least one route (although the difference was only 1000 rubles). We weren't happy with the return flight. Still, Sheremetyevo is right nearby, and returning to Domodedovo guaranteed at least +40 minutes to get home. The extra fee for changing the flight to Sheremetyevo for 4 people was around 3000-4000 rubles. We decided to save. A few days later, I received an email about changing the flight to Sheremetyevo.

20 days before departure, I received an email with the latest information on arrival in Turkey. On September 13th, my morning started with attempts to call Pegas. I received a happy email with a flight change to a really inconvenient time. Now I was losing a whole day! That is, we wouldn't be at the hotel around 2 pm, but around 7 pm. In the VKontakte community, the manager was slow to respond, and I didn't get a response to my email either. I didn't get a callback either. I listened to terrible music on the hotline where the girl finally understood after three attempts that the booking was made on the website, then tried to switch to the sales department (again, terrible music). A few hours later, around 3 pm, I received a response. From the email, it was clear that you could only choose another flight for a few days, but I asked for the price.

I mean, Pegasus Touristik basically gave me two options: either choose a different charter for almost 33,000 rubles or fly Turkish Airlines for 40+ hours (originally, they wanted me to pay an extra 12,000 rubles on top of that). And here's where my dear reader is going to say, 'But you booked the charter yourself, what were you thinking?' Well... Two 11-day tours were booked. We had planned to lose one day specifically because of the charter. If the flight to Moscow was early, we wouldn't have wasted half a day wandering around the hotel, and the remaining half-day would've been spent at the airport. If we'd known that Pegasus Touristik would somehow manage to push the morning flight to the evening, we would've booked 12 days without a problem. It's not even about the money at this point. The 12-day tour would've been cheaper than the whole extra payment for regular flights. I should give credit where credit is due – the manager was pretty responsive to my emails, and we did eventually get a call back. 28 September, flight on 1 October. More 'good luck' messages, and another flight delay! This is getting ridiculous, especially considering I'd paid for the 'choose your seat' service just a day before. This delay means we'll miss dinner at the hotel and have to pay for lunch at the airport – for four people! I'm speechless, Pegasus!

So, I tried again, double-checking for available seats on the Pegas Touristik website. And within about 30-40 minutes, I got a response: I refreshed the page on the website, but the image didn't change. And that's when I started questioning the website: if there really weren't any seats available, why was it showing that there were seats on the early flights?! On the night of December 30th to 1st, I checked the flights again, and to my surprise, there was one seat available on an earlier flight! I checked the flight and class of service, and I couldn't see any differences. It was just a regular economy class flight. When we arrived, we were greeted in the classic way, but due to Pegas' new policy, the guides who handle transfers (according to their own words) no longer accompany tourists from the airport to the hotel and vice versa, making it impossible to control how long the single stop takes. We weren't lucky, and in the bus with us were already tourists who had taken it upon themselves to extend the already 2-hour journey to Alanya to 3 hours, and as a result, we arrived at the hotel almost at midnight! And I thought that was it, but Pegas decided to one-up me in the draft of my review by changing the flight again. And then again... And then they even delayed us, and in the end, we took off almost at the originally planned time. On top of constantly monitoring our flight, we Coral Travel tourists were expecting to receive information about the transfer to the airport a day in advance. We got it 6 hours before. Well, thanks for even bothering to pick up the phone.Overall, the flights themselves are pretty decent, but unfortunately, the charter flights are a letdown - they're cramped and dirty. You can argue about charter flights all you want, but that's not what this review is about. My review is all about the complete lack of customer service from Pegasus, especially considering their website and how they display available seats on flights. We won't be using Pegasus again. Unless, of course, we can somehow combine it with regular flights, but... why would we need Pegasus then?

I wouldn't recommend Pegasus Touristic, and I really hope this review was helpful for you!

You can check out my review of Coral Travel here.