My friends and I had a bad experience with a tour operator that one of us found on line after looking at trip advisor reviews (we've since been told by other people in Ethiopia he fakes these reviews). The guy's name is Desalgne Gebrie but he calls himself Dezy. We now call him Dodgy Dezy.
A 4 day 3 night hiking trip to the Simien Mountains was arranged through Dezy. He'd quoted USD350 for one person in his original email and said that if there was a larger group he'd drop it to USD300 per person. On the day of departure our friend who'd organized everything with him woke up with a bad case of food poisoning and was too sick to travel. We and Dezy met him at his hotel at 7:30 am and could see that he was in no state to go. Dezy took the remaining 2 of us to a cash machine so that we could pay for the trip in full up front which we promptly did.
Imagine then our surprise when we arrived in Debark 2.5 hrs later, collected our scout, guide and cook and the rented camping gear when Dezy suddenly opened the van door (it was a van not the promised 4x4 from his email) and told us that there was a problem and that as our friend had stayed behind we now had to pay him an extra USD100 each (USD50 more than he'd originally quoted) as we were no longer a group tour, we were a private tour. He then threatened to leave us in Debark if we didn't pay. We told him in no uncertain terms that this was no way to do business and that if there was a conversation to be had about additional costs due to our friends illness they should have taken place before we left Gonder.
We discovered on day 4 that the lack of the previously promised 4x4 meant we had a 3 hour up hill hike from our camp to a pick up point as his van couldn't make it down the road to Chennak. When we returned to Gonder (we'd already paid up front so we weren't backing out at that point) we had a further discussion with Dodgy Dezy about his demand for an extra USD200 from us. We told him that we were prepared to compromise and give him an additional $50 as that was the price he'd originally quoted our friend. He refused to take the US$100 bill we offered him and stormed off after telling us that he should just have left us to sleep in the community lodges instead of providing us with tents. We thought we'd seen the last of him until he turned up at our hotel the next morning as we were leaving for the airport wailing "why won't you pay me my money, I can't pay my staff". We didn't have time to call the police as we should have done and ended up giving him some money to get rid of him. Someone from our hotel then said incredulously "you booked with him? He's a hustler"
Yes Dezy is a hustler and apparently this is not the first time he's pulled this kind of stunt. He told our friend that he couldn't return his deposit because he'd taken us to Debark and then we'd just disappeared off into the mountains by ourselves. Dodgy Dezy is the sort of tour operator who doesn't honor his part of the bargain and who will extort money from people as he did from us. Strongly advise you find a reputable tour operator. Dodgy Dezy should be put out of business.
