I had always wanted to visit Brazil. This year I looked through Thomas Cook's brochure to find holidays to Brazil including a 6 day tour of Rio and Iguacu falls. I had never been on a tour like the one descibed in the brochure before and I thought that at least with Thomas Cook, it would be well organised. How wrong was I.

If you're thinking of booking the Rio and the falls tour followed by Costa du Sauipe my advice would be to book with a different company. Not Thomas Cook.

Someone at Thomas Cook decided to change our itinerary without telling us. This meant many problems arose to name but a few: When arrived in Rio, at 10 a.m, we waited 30 mins. for our luggage. We found out our luggage was sent on to Iguacu. We went outside into arrivals to find there was no rep to meet us. We tried phoning the emergency number but no one answered. Finally after having spent 3 and a half hours in the airport, someone from Thomas Cook finally answered the phone and sent someone to meet us. Our tour of Rio had to be postponed to the next day.

The next day we were told 3 different times of our flight to Iguacu. In the end the tour guide guaranteed that they had our tickets and our flight would leave at 11 a.m. The day we were to leave for Iguacu, we queued for 2 hours at check in, only to have missed our flights because Thomas Cook refused to buy new tickets at the price the airline were charging. So they hadn't even bought our tickets the previous evening. We then had to go back to the airport in the evening. That evening we hung around Rio airport and Sao Paulo for hours. We were taken to Rio airport at 7p.m and arrived at our hotel in Iguacu after 12:30 a.m.

For the final leg of our tour, we were to return to Salvador where we would spend 8 days at a beach resort in Costa Du Sauipe. We were told by our rep that the flight would land in Rio but we didn't need to get off the plane. She assured us that the plane would only be about 20 mins letting other people that wanted to go to Rio off and others on. Yet again, nothing was according to what we were told. We ended up having to get off at Rio airport and waiting 2 and a half hours in the airport for our connecting flight. So it was after 1:30 a.m that we had arrived at our final hotel. We arrived at the airport in Iguacu at 7:00 and it took us that long to get to our last hotel.

We never fully enjoyed our tour as we spent more time at airports than we did on the tours.We were so tired throughout the rest of the holiday and fairly upset by our ordeal.

To make matters worse Thomas Cook are refusing to pay anymore than £60 compensation for a £400 tour.

Is it just me, or is that actually an insult? I feel we should recieve much more for all the hassel we endured.