Ireland Walk Hike Bike

Our point of contact with Kimkim changed several times both before end during the trip. Most of the time, we didn't even know who our point of contact was. We were told that David would be our driver the entire time we were in Killarney, yet we never saw him for five days. He didn't respond to the one text we sent him. The one day we had a time constraint was our boat ride from Ross Castle in Killarney. We were told that Dave would arrive in his taxi at 9:45 AM. At 9:40 AM, I sent a text to Ireland Hike Bike and Dr. asking them where Dave was. Just after that, a taxi driver drove up and when we ask if he worked for Dave. He did not confirm or deny but said he was here to take two people to Ross's castle. We got in the cab and made it to Ross's castle in plenty of time. He gave us a card with his phone number on it so that we could contact his agency to get the return trip to our hotel. Since our itinerary said that we were to call Dave to get a ride back to the hotel, and since Dave had not shown up at our hotel to take us there, we called the number given us by the taxi cab driver when we got Ready to come back. A taxi arrived within five minutes and took us back to our hotel. At that point, I happen to check my texts, then I saw that Dave had been late and supposedly arrived at our hotel at perhaps 9:55 AM. Another text said that Dave had been waiting for us to take us back to the hotel. Since we thought we had to call Dave, we found that to be quite surprising. Also, we find it hard to believe that he would drive 30 minutes to pick us up when he hadn't dropped us off. On the plus side, we did get a refund from Kimkim for the €60 we spent for the two cabs, as the cab fair was supposed to be included in our itinerary.
Prior to that, we are expecting someone named Philip to pick us up in Galway at our hotel to drive us to the cliffs of Moher and then drop our luggage off at our hotel in Doolin. I looked on the map and saw that Doolin was on our way to the cliffs, so I decided to propose to Philip that he stop at our hotel so that we could drop off our luggage there, and then drop us off at the cliffs. Instead of Philip, a lady named Anne showed up to pick us up. I told Anne about my proposal to drop a luggage off first, and she seemed reluctant to do it for some reason. I mentioned to her several times that our hotel was in DOOLIN, but she corrected me so that I thought perhaps our hotel was in a small town near DOOLIN. Thank God, I asked her to drop the luggage off first, because she drove past the cliffs to a small town on the other side of the cliffs and pulled into the parking lot. We checked our itinerary, and that was not our hotel. So if we had not changed her plan, we would've ended up taking the bus to DOOLIN, and our luggage would've been in some hotel we wouldn't even know the name of in some town we never heard of a good 20 minutes away at least.

The experience started off great with our KimKim guide Joe. Things changed after that and we felt that the information Joe had provided had not been effectively shared with Dean. Joe was incredibly personable and had great recommendations and personal stories that brought us comfort and peace of mind. Dean was trying to pick up where Joe left off and it was not smooth.
The highs of our trip were the accommodations and the breakfasts (but even those were a bit much near the end). We really liked our Dublin and Mout Juliet hotels. I appreciated the communication once we arrived in Ireland, especially with Morris (see later note).
I'll list some opportunities for improvement here:
1. There are too many choices in the daily schedule. We came to KimKim because we wanted someone else to help choose our activities and in the end, we still had to do that work.
2. It was not made clear to us how busy Ireland would be in August and that we should have been pre-booking things like activities at Mount Juliet or restaurants for dinner in small towns (like Lahinch).
3. Even though we discussed with KimKim that both my husband and I would be driving, Hertz charged us an extra 10 Euro per day for a second driver.
4. Three nights is too many in Killarney. It is a very busy town in August and we would have preferred exploring Dingle and spending another night in Mount Juliet.
5. There was unnecessary stress on our day at the Gap of Dunloe. From the very beginning we understood with Joe that we would be taking a boat trip and a jarvey ride back. When everything was booked, there was no jarvey ride. Now we understand that the jarveys need to be connected with in person. This was not made clear to us in advance. We also didn't understand how much money it was be. It was a lovely day, but Morris was challenged with securing us a booking (of sorts) the day before because we couldn't be stranded at Lord B's cottage without a ride for our 9 year old. Morris did a fabulous job, but it was very stressful for him and it should never have gotten this far.
6. I understand you have policies of not sharing your fees. In this day and age, this seems unnecessary. Companies seem to be respected more for transparency. I would be so excited to know what great deals you were getting on hotels. I know I'm paying someone to design our trip for us, I just want to know what I'm paying them.
7. Finally, something less important since we are resourceful, it would help for the days when we don't have a rental car (in our case this was in Dublin) for guidance on public transit or taxis. We ran into an issue with requesting a taxi at our hotel where the taxi driver was called from the airport and given an incorrect destination for us (hertz airport vs. city) even though we gave the destination address to the hotel host. AND the tram was right outside our hotel, so a link to that would have been super helpful.

If you've made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read.