Our guide for the trip was absolutely fantastic. He arrived early, was very nice and personable, and a safe driver.
Our day started with a river cruise in the wetlands, which was lovely!
After lunch we went to Isimangaliso for the afternoon game drive through the park. Unfortunately, that's where things started to go downhill. We were denied entry and informed at the gate (by the rangers) that the entire company had been banned from the park due to one of the guides being caught illegally off-roading inside the National Park.
As mentioned earlier, our guide was fantastic. We attempted to enter at a different park gate and were denied entry there as well. Our guide then spent almost an hour calling and trying to find us another company to take a game drive with. He was unsuccessful and we had to return to Durban.
When we returned I kindly reached out to company management and requested a partial refund since we were not provided with the entire guarenteed tour. The manager became immediately defensive, insisting the company had not been banned (the park rangers were lying?) and that he would get back to me when he spoke to our guide (even though our guide had been on the phone with him several times already during the situation).
It took 3 days for the manager to get back to me and agree to provide a very small refund (personally I would have liked a larger refund since the issue was due to his employee acting illegally, but I was grateful to get anything). He assured me the refund would be processed the next day, but it was not processed for an additional SIX days after I had to follow up with them again. And even then I was provided a refund even smaller than they had originally offered by several percent.
Given how expensive this excursion was, we were very disappointed with how we were treated when the company was very clearly at fault for the situation. Hopefully they took the incident seriously and the employee responsible for the banning faced appropriate consequences so future guests do not have the same problems.