As
@DLSJR and
@Red Leg and I have shared on this site from personal experience, when the crap hits the fan and you are traveling with complex itineraries to wild and remote locations, a long-term experienced agency with extensive contacts, like Gracy, can fix things that others cannot. I haven't heard of any nightmare stories about Gracy. A slow phone call back or having to double check seat assignments or a transposed serial number that you always need to verify anyway just doesn't stack up to the major problems that some of us have experienced.
@DLSJR has shared his story of being trapped in Tanzania and Gracy came to the rescue.
I was told by another agency just three days before departure for a 21-day full bag safari in Tanzania, even though the change happened months earlier, that I should just leave my guns at home when Qatar farmed out the flight from Doha to Arusha to Oman Airlines. It is illegal to borrow firearms in Tanzania and it is a Lacey Act Felony to import animals into the USA that are taken illegally. The other alternative we were given was to switch airlines from Qatar to Ethiopian and change up our whole itinerary, costing us thousands of dollars and the loss of the Qatar Q-Suite seats with a short layover in Addis Abba on Ethiopian, which makes for a stressful firearms check in Addis. We had no choice but to change airlines and four of us barely made the connection in Addis by running through the airport with our wives.
I called Debbie Gracy about this issue and she told me that she had recognized the Qatar/Oman gun problem months earlier and that through her long-term contacts, she had solved the problem for Gracy customers while the agency I used (just this one time) did not even try until just a week before we departed. The agency tried to fix our gun issue and get the guns approved but could not get it done and we were forced to completely change our itinerary and airline while Gracy clients had no trouble on the Qatar/Oman flights with guns.
If you are just going to South Africa, I think you can use other agencies but if you are going to wilderness locales or have a complicated itinerary, I would suggest Gracy. Shawn at Gracy has organized complicated, multi-city, international hunts for me and European trips for me and my family with a driver in each city and a personal guide in each city with three choices of hotels in each city, train tickets, airline tickets, venue tickets, etc... without any problems. I believe Shawn has done the same for
@Red Leg several times.
