Student Tour Operator Leaves Trail of Complaints

“We didn’t look into this company,” said Michelle Kish of Rancho Cucamonga. “We just assumed that, since they were marketing our kids, they’d be on the up and up.”

It’s a sad tale. Especially depressing is the inability of the government to curtail scams. In this case, reports from across the country show, it’s only gotten worse since the authorities filed lawsuits.

The company is Surf & Sun Inc., forced out of Phoenix by action of the Arizona attorney general, and now headquartered in Jupiter, Fla. It has been associated with five different company names in the recent past.

It bills itself as “America’s No. 1 Student Tour Operator.” Its web site--www.surfandsuntours.com--looks great. The “World’s Best Student Vacation Packages,” it proclaims. “An excellent meal program absolutely free.” There are restaurants and menus, nightclubs and special events. The firm has trips to Cancun, Jamaica, Mazatlan, Acapulco and Nassau and a cruise.

The World Wide Web makes countless offers. What is difficult, I find, is assessing their reliability.

Long before Surf & Sun took Kish’s son, Matt, and 13 other Etiwanda students--not to mention 1,500 other high school graduates in all--to Cancun, for a week beginning June 21, it was in trouble.

Besides Arizona, Surf & Sun was sued a year ago by the California attorney general. South Dakota has also sued. It is under investigation in at least six other states. Complaints have reached more than 1,000.

In California, Deputy Atty. Gen. Jerry Smilowitz outlined for me the original charges. “There are major problems with their trips,” he said. “Hotels fall through or are downgraded, flights are very late, they fail to issue refunds, or to honor meal coupons.”

Smilowitz asked for the Etiwanda names and phone numbers so he could add them to his lawsuit.

But, according to Matt Kish, Rodney Hernandez and Janelle Clignett, three Etiwanda graduates, their Surf & Sun trips initially priced at $800 had problems Smilowitz didn’t even mention.

The graduates said that after their promised “direct” flight was delayed by a seven-hour layover in Mexico City, seven of their group, five boys and two girls, were assigned late at night to a single Sheraton hotel room, with just one king size bed, in Cancun.

Although the next night they obtained two rollaways for $20, they spent four nights in the room, and then they got tossed out of that hotel and moved to another.

Prices of the trip were jacked up after they paid for it, they said.

“The party package really didn’t cover much,” said Hernandez. “Places we were told we’d get into, we still had to pay, so they ripped us off there.”

The delays in their flights at least were not cancellations. Accounts in several Midwest newspapers say hundreds of youngsters have had Surf & Sun charters canceled without advance notice and then found trip refunds hard, or impossible, to come by.

I contacted Surf & Sun, reaching a man at the Florida headquarters who said he was Jason Lowder, national sales manager.

Lowder readily agreed that one of the appeals of Cancun to high school graduates, as Michelle Kish suggested, is that Mexico has an 18-year age limit for alcohol, and the Surf & Sun party package offers some unlimited drink events.

“We’re not baby-sitters or chaperons,” Lowder said. “If we see a kid who’s drinking. we don’t pull a drink out of their hand.”

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What about the kids saying many places don’t honor the packages that started out at $99 and ended up at $140?

“The party package is not sold by us,” Lowder said. “The only thing we have to do with it is to check out the safety of the places.”

But what about the hotel overcrowding and mixing of sexes?

“This is the biggest complaint we get on these tours,” Lowder said. “There are overbookings, but I never heard of a situation where seven were in one room.”

Lowder said he would check into the experience of the Etiwanda students and talk to me the next day.

But I never succeeded in reaching him again, or any other Surf & Sun official or lawyer. Messages went unanswered.

It was possible to nail down a few facts. For instance, parents Kish and Kathy Hernandez said that in the days before their kids left on the trip, no vouchers had arrived, and when they called to find out why, they were told by Surf & Sun they must pay a $30 Mexicana Airlines fuel surcharge first.

But Jennifer Jenks, spokeswoman for Mexicana, said, “We don’t have surcharges. Once you purchase a ticket, the price is locked in.”

Every time there was an additional Surf & Sun charge, it had to go on a credit card, and every time there was such a transaction, there was a $25 credit card fee.

The night the Etiwanda kids got tossed out of the Sheraton, they ended up less crowded at the Fiesta Americana. Helping them, Kathy Hernandez said, were agents of another firm, U.S. Student Travel.

I reached Ally Hanley, a Cancun manager for that company. She said she intervened to facilitate the transfer after more than 100 Surf & Sun kids were evicted, on 15 minutes’ notice, from the Sheraton.

“We’ve seen this go on for a couple of weeks,” Hanley said. “They didn’t have reservations for enough rooms. They didn’t have any staff to help the displaced kids. They are so unscrupulous, it’s harming the reputation of all the companies.”

The Etiwanda contingent survived the misadventures. Clignett said, “We wasted our senior trip. The whole thing was ruined. But we had no bad experiences with the boys. We’ve known them all their lives. We were pretty lucky the guys let us stay with them, because if not we would have had to go to another island all by ourselves.”

Good. But the cases against this company should be pursued. Smilowitz suggested refunds. That sounds proper. Injunctions suspending further trips by Surf & Sun would be even more proper.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.