1/2 Thought this updated COVID episode might be useful to folks on this forum.
We were booked on a RS Sicily tour for March/April. For background, we are fairly well-seasoned independent travelers, and this was to be our second RS tour. We also had bivalent boosters in October 2022, wore masks on flights, etc.
We arrived in Rome on a Sunday. Our tour started on Tuesday - but by Wednesday evening, husband had mild cold symptoms. COVID was not even a thought - no fever, mild symptoms, no fatigue. Thursday morning, I mentioned the cold to our guide, assured him we would mask, hubs would load up on cold meds, and did he want us to sit in the back of the bus, etc. Almost as an afterthought, he said “Oh, we need to test for COVID.” (this is not a criticism, I include it here to emphasize the mildness of the symptoms and that COVID is just not top-of-mind these days).
The test came back positive.
And we were dropped like hot potatoes (well, husband was. I was negative, and was told I could continue on the tour. Which was a weird thing to offer lol - “bye honey, feel better, see you in Catania in 9 days!” Uh, no.). Again, not a criticism of our guides or RS Tours - they had 20 other people to handle and get out the door that morning, and a schedule to keep. But it's important to realize that you will not get a hand-holding level of service - and I want to emphasize that RS makes this very clear, IMO. It's on you to figure out any testing required, hotel needs, meals, changes in travel, etc. Still, it was very...abrupt.
Our guide spoke with the hotel and arranged that we could stay another 3 nights - at our expense, of course. We spent a while Thursday figuring out what to do with travel insurance, testing, and what to do after Sunday (move to another hotel? Continue touring Sicily? Etc)
We contacted TravelGuard on what we needed to do to submit claims and were informed that we needed a certificate of a positive test from an official licensed medical facility. It did not have to be a PCR test, and whatever “official” facility at our location would work (i.e., in Palermo, this was certain pharmacies). After a few hours, Travel Guard did follow up with a couple of locations to get tested in Palermo, but neither was close (we were walking) or convenient to our hotel.
We contacted On Call International Global Assistance, which is the RS contracted support resource and found them pretty useless. We wanted to know where to go for testing. We got no response to a text message and nothing more than an acknowledgement to an email. We did get an email from RS Tours - On Call had contacted THEM to generate tour interruption documentation. Which is not what I had asked for. And presumably something I would have gotten anyway.
Rick Steves Tours contacted us quite quickly with information that again confirmed that “you’ll have to figure it out” as noted above. They produced tour interruption documentation promptly. They also mentioned that we needed official positive COVID test documentation for them as well to process our tour refund. (CORRECTION: Email indicated that "self-administered" is OK, although not sure what we would have sent. What is a "copy" of a self-administered test? Maybe a photo of the test?) Which I thought was odd considering they were the ones who tossed us off the tour to start with, based on a test their guide administered. The partial refund for the tour was processed quite promptly, so that was great.
Hotel Ambasciatori staff were wonderful, I have to say. Gave us two convenient pharmacy locations and explained that these were where “official” testing and documentation for COVID could be obtained. Not all “farmacia” do it, so you do need to check to get the locations of the ones who do.