Flash Pack offered me hush money to not discuss my trip honestly online
I went on Flash Pack's Bali Immersion trip in December 2024. Overall, I would give the trip a 3/5 stars for various reasons I'm happy to get into if anyone has questions, but I would give their customer support and the company itself a 0/5 stars for how they responded to my feedback about the trip.
About a week after the trip, I got an email asking me to provide feedback which was presented as solely for internal review and trip improvement purposes. The survey got into sensitive/personal subjects such as how safe I felt on the trip, how much I liked my roommate, etc. Near the end, there are some opt-in questions about whether I would want Flash Pack to contact me about going on future trips or to allow Flash Pack to share my experiences in their Backpackers newsletter, neither of which I opted into. I also shared my honest, negative feedback about some of the hotel selections and some misleading representations by the company about what the activities would include (ex., the Bali Immersion - Day 7 pictures and activities list made it sound like we would take a beautiful, private speed boat to Nusa Penida but we actually took a large, very old, crowded and smelly ferry over).
About two months after the trip, I get an email from Flash Pack saying that they were making some changes to the trip in response to the feedback and that they were offering a $300 USD refund or $400 USD credit towards a future trip as a "gesture of good will." I then took a look at the Bali immersion page and saw that one of the few positive comments I shared in the feedback request had been posted without my consent in the Community Highlights section. I asked that the comment be taken down, to which I got two non-committal "we've made a request and will provide an update" responses. Then, when I tried to accept the $300 USD refund offer, Flash Pack said that I had to also effectively agree to an NDA in order to receive the refund. I was shocked that Flash Pack tried to buy my silence and get me to waive my right to discuss this trip online, when hypocritically they had basically already forced me to discuss this trip online misleadingly by only sharing my few nice comments. I refused the refund and NDA, and after laying into them one more time, they did finally take down my comment. However, the fact that they posted it in the first place, then took 7 emails for them to actually take it down, all while trying to get me not to talk about them honestly online, was appalling to me.